VIII. AVOWALS (part 2 of 2)

VIII. AVOWALS (part 2 of 2)

"As I said before, mein Herr, the dames of this haughty house were gentle and good, and when poor Bertha was left desolate, the Countess Barbara sent for her to the castle, and placed her among her own daughters as a sort of companion and teacher; for she had inherited from her mother great dexterity in the use of the needle, and from her father not a little artistic skill.

"For a time all went well. But alas! to every day, however bright, there comes an ending; and thus the morning of Bertha's happiness faded and deepened into night.

"There arrived from a long journey in the East the eldest son of the house, the young Rupert; none handsomer, none wittier, none more courtly than he. Unlike his father and most of his progenitors, he possessed a winning tongue and beguiling air; he had loitered in ladies' bowers, and they had taught him well.

"Into the pure blue eyes of the Lily of Ausfeldt he looked as would the serpent into the eyes of a trembling dove. But the blue depths, though they quivered, grew no darker nor deeper; there was no guile in the heart, and it knew not the presence of sin. Close to the innocent cheek of the maiden the tempter breathed his poisonous breath; but the guardian angel of purity folded his wings about her, and wafted a fold of his misty veil between that hot breath and her unsoiled innocence, until, man of the world though he was, Count Rupert shrank into himself abashed, and loved for the first time in his reckless life with a pure, deep, passionate love.

"Day after day he sought her side, night after night they wandered together by the river; her soul all full of faith, and hope, and beauty; his racked by fears of his father's anger; for in his heart of hearts he knew that his father would sooner slay him with his own hand than bend the lofty pride of Ausfeldt to a union with a simple burgher maiden.

"Ach, ach, Herr Karl! love is a pleasant thing, and a delicious thing, and a holy thing; for it is heaven-born: but woman's faith is still more beautiful and heavenly; and man's fickleness and perfidy the story of every day. It has been the same all the world over since time began, and so it will be to the end.

"They parted at last--war called him away; but he left her with a vow upon his lips that was broken ere the birds sang the advent of another summer. There came rumors of a marriage with a great heiress of the north; but Bertha knew no fears, for her own heart was pure and true, and she did not dream that his could be faithless. Alas! there are many like her in the world, mein Herr, even in our day, when most people are forgetting what love means.

"Soon the castle was astir with unusual bustle and preparation, and then there was no secret made of the fact that the young Lord Rupert would soon bring home a bride. Whether he was weak or wicked, who can tell? God has judged and meted him his portion long ere this; but in her heart poor Bertha never blamed him. Yet she grew pale and thin; but no one noticed it; and that she spent long nights of weary weeping none knew save her guardian angel.

"It was a still, starry midnight. All alone in her little chamber, Bertha leaned forth from the casement; but she did not weep. Suddenly, as by an irresistible impulse, she hurried from the room, down the winding stairs, through the long garden, down, down the steep hill, till she stood on the brink of the river.

"Beneath her its waters flowed dark and rippling, and they were cold, oh! so cold, and her head burned and throbbed so wildly.

"One plunge, and her woes would be over for ever--thus whispered the fiend beside her--one step, and the cool waves would receive her! 'What is life to thee now?' said a mocking voice in her ear. 'What eternity of woe canst thou suffer more terrible than this? There is no eternity, naught but oblivion. Nearer and nearer thy faithless lover hastens with his beautiful bride; how canst thou bear day after day to meet him, to dwell under the same roof with thy rival. Have courage, plunge boldly! the waves, more merciful than the world, will receive thee, and to-morrow thou wilt float on their broad bosom, far away to the sea.'

"As the maiden lifted her hands from her eyes, as though to take a last look on the world ere she left it, something white gleamed in the moonlight; it was the stone crucifix at whose feet she had so often knelt in days of happiness and innocence, the cross her father had fashioned with hands and heart consecrated to heaven.

"Trembling in every limb, she dragged her weary feet to the spot; and as she threw herself upon her knees before the image, bitter sobs burst from her bosom.

"The sad face of the dead Christ looked down upon her with eyes of divine compassion, and brought to her memory and to her heart a vision of the dear departed who had wrought this labor of love, and of that father's affection, and of his pure and holy teachings, which she had so nearly forgotten for evermore.

"With a wild cry she clasped the nail-pierced feet, and her whole soul poured itself forth in one deep, wailing supplication.

"'My God, my God!' she moaned, 'why hast thou forsaken me? Take me out of this weary world, as I lie here penitent and fearful, lest the evil one come again to tempt me, and I yield in my weakness and brokenness of heart. The river is black and pitiless, my Saviour; but not so black and pitiless as the world. Save me, oh! save me from myself. How shall I know that thou hast not deserted me? How shall I hope that thou wilt pardon, that thou wilt hear my prayer?'

"The moon, which had shrunk behind a cloud, came softly forth and bathed the image and the shrinking figure at its feet in holy light; while, as the maiden knelt, there passed into her stricken heart a quiet, hopeful feeling, and, looking up half timidly, she pushed back her loosened hair to meet once more the sad, pitying glance above her.

"And then she clasped her trembling hands together, and bent her weary head low down to the very earth; for around the brow of the dead Christ there shone a heavenly halo, blood trickled from the thorny crown and reddened the outstretched hands, and from the soft, compassionate eyes great tears were falling.

* * * * *

"Twenty years afterward, the holy Abbess of Ausfeldt lay upon her death-bed; and the good sisters gathered around her, and even the choristers and little serving-boys; for they all loved her well: and there came into her eyes a light, and to her voice a strength, neither had known for many a day; and just as I tell it to you, mein Herr, she told them the story of the Christ of Ausfeldt. For her name had been Bertha, and it was her own story.

"And she begged that no Christian might ever pass the sacred spot without breathing a prayer for her soul. Ah! mein Herr, many a time have I passed the holy image and almost fancied it smiled upon me as I went."

Silently Frau Gretchen folded up her knitting, and with a sigh toward the river, and another toward the ruined castle, stepped slowly down the garden path, humming dreamily as she walked Schiller's song of "The Mill":

"The mill-wheel ceaseless turneth, Beside the mill I know; But she who once did dwell there Hath vanished long ago."

Catching her thought, I murmured the plaintive words as I passed out of the gateway and down the old, shadowy street. They had "vanished long ago"--the great inheritors and the noble line, the faithless lover and the pure "Lily of Ausfeldt." But the bright, silvery moonlight made clear and distinct the sculptured image I had come to seek. The legend had invested it with an almost living interest, and as I paused before it, with as reverential a feeling as I have ever known in the contemplation of earth's grandest Raphaels or Murillos, I said half aloud, as I lingered for a moment near the quiet river, "O beautiful old German legends! may you live in your purity and holiness in the hearts of the German people as long as the Rhine flows through the pleasant courses and by the fruitful vineyards its wandering spirit loves."

MRS. SETON.[184]

Elizabeth Ann Bayley, the foundress of the Sisterhood of Charity in the United States, was born in the city of New York, on the 28th of August, 1774. Her father, Dr. Richard Bayley, was a physician of good family and distinguished position, a member of the Church of England, and a man of many natural virtues; but he cared very little about religion, and wherever his daughter may have got the pious inclinations which distinguished her in girlhood, she certainly did not get them from him. Her mother, whose maiden name was Charlton, died while Elizabeth was a child. Under the care of her father, however, Miss Bayley was well educated and trained in domestic duties. At the age of nineteen she married Mr. William Magee Seton, eldest son of a prosperous New York merchant, and descendant of an ancient Scottish patrician family, whose head is the Earl of Winton. Their married life was eminently happy, and for six or seven years fortune smiled upon them. Commercial disasters at last swept away their property. Dr. Bayley died suddenly of a malignant fever contracted in the discharge of his duty as health officer of the port; Mr. Seton's health failed, and in 1803 the husband and wife determined to make a voyage to Italy. They suffered a long and painful quarantine at Leghorn, and a week after their release Mr. Seton died, leaving his wife in a strange land with her eldest child, a girl of nine years. Mrs. Seton was not, however, without comfort and protection. Two estimable Italian gentlemen, Philip and Anthony Filicchi, personal friends and business correspondents of the Setons, took her to their home and treated her with most brotherly kindness. Under the influence of the devout household of which they were the heads, the religious sentiments of the young widow were gradually developed into a strong attraction toward the Catholic Church. She went with the Filicchis to mass; she visited the chapels; she learned devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Early in February, 1804, about six weeks after Mr. Seton's death, she sailed for home. But it was not the purpose of Providence that she should be withdrawn so soon from associations which were to influence remarkably her future life. In a severe storm the vessel in which she had taken passage was so much injured as to be driven back to port. Before another was ready to sail, Mrs. Seton's child was taken sick. Close upon the recovery of the child, followed the sickness of the mother; and when, in April, they were ready again to embark, one of the Filicchi brothers, Anthony, offered to bear them company. During the long voyage of nearly two months, Mrs. Seton made frequent opportunities to talk with her friend upon religion, and before the vessel reached New York she was virtually a convert. The last step cost her much suffering and perplexity. It is a step which hardly ever is taken without pain. In her case there was not only the dread of estrangement from affectionate relatives, but she could not face with composure the inevitable rupture with a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church who had exercised a great deal of influence upon her character and her earlier life. This was the amiable John Henry Hobart, afterward Bishop of New York, a man who was deeply and deservedly beloved, and for whom Mrs. Seton in particular cherished a filial regard. By Mr. Filicchi's advice, she exposed her difficulties to Mr. Hobart. He made an elaborate reply to them. He talked with her frequently. He used all his talent, all his scholarship, all his personal influence to keep her in the denomination in which she had been born. Between Mr. Hobart and her family, on the one hand, and the letters of Philip Filicchi and personal interviews with Anthony, on the other, her perplexity became painful to the last degree. At last, on Ash-Wednesday, 1805, she was received into the church by Father O'Brien, at St. Peter's, in Barclay street. Her soul was now at peace, but her temporal troubles had only begun. Old friends and nearest relatives turned away horrified and angry, and when soon afterward her sister-in-law Cecilia was likewise baptized a Catholic, the indignation of the family knew no bounds. She was without fortune, and when she tried to earn a support by teaching, she found the good Protestants of New York afraid to intrust the education of their children to an emissary of the pope, perhaps a female Jesuit in disguise. The kindness of her excellent Italian friends again came to her relief. They charged themselves with the education of her children, placed the two sons at Georgetown College, gave her an allowance of $400 a year, and begged Mrs. Seton to draw upon them for whatever money she wanted. We believe she was not obliged, however, to avail herself of this generous offer.

Mrs. Seton seems to have formed, at an early period of her widowhood, the project of devoting herself to God in the service of a religious order, and her first plan was to go to Canada and join some sisterhood there. It was a part of this scheme, however, that her children should enter a house of education at Montreal, where she could still give them the maternal care which their tender years required. Providential obstacles defeated this design, and thus she was reserved for the establishment in her own country of the noble institute with which her name will always be connected. We shall quote from Dr. White's Life the story of how she began the great work of her career:

"Her thoughts were more practically directed to it by the Rev. William Valentine Dubourg, president of St. Mary's College in Baltimore. He became acquainted with her in the following way: Having visited the city of New York in the autumn of 1806, he was one morning offering up the holy sacrifice of mass in St. Peter's Church, when a lady presented herself at the communion-rail, and, bathed in tears, received the Blessed Sacrament at his hands. He was struck with the uncommon deportment and piety of the communicant, and when afterward seated at the breakfast-table with the Rev. Mr. Sibourd, one of the pastors of the church, he inquired who she was, rightly judging in his mind that it was Mrs. Seton, of whose conversion and edifying life he had been informed. Before Mr. Sibourd had time to answer his question, a gentle tap at the door was heard, and the next moment Mrs. Seton was introduced, and knelt before the priest of God to receive his blessing. Entering into conversation with her respecting her sons and her intentions in their regard, he learned from her the views and wishes of Mr. Filicchi, as stated above, and the remote expectation she had of removing herself, with her daughters, to Canada. Mr. Dubourg, who was a man of enlarged views and remarkable enterprise, no sooner became acquainted with the design which she entertained of retiring at some future period into a religious community, for the welfare of herself and her children, than he suggested the practicability of the scheme within the limits of the United States. Mrs. Seton immediately wrote to Bishop Carroll, informing him of what had passed between her and Mr. Dubourg, and requesting his advice in the matter. 'I could not venture,' she says, 'to take a further step in so interesting a situation without your concurrence and direction, which also, I am assured, will the more readily obtain for me the blessing of Him whose will alone it is my earnest desire to accomplish.' After mentioning the particular trials she had to contend with in New York, and assuring Dr. Carroll that she had yielded in condescension to her opponents every point possible consistently with her peace for the hour of death, she continues, 'And for that hour, my dear sir, I now beg you to consider, while you direct me how to act for my dear little children, who in that hour, if they remain in their present situation, would be snatched from our dear faith as from an accumulation of error as well as misfortune to them. For myself, certainly the only fear I can have is that there is too much of self-seeking in pleading for the accomplishment of this object, which, however, I joyfully yield to the will of the Almighty, confident that, as he has disposed my heart to wish above all things to please him, it will not be disappointed in the desire, whatever may be his appointed means. The embracing a religious life has been, from the time I was in Leghorn, so much my hope and consolation, that I would at any moment have embraced all the difficulties of again crossing the ocean to attain it, little imagining it could be accomplished here. But now my children are so circumstanced that I could not die in peace (and you know, dear sir, we must make every preparation) except I felt the full conviction I had done all in my power to shield them from it; in that case, it would be easy to commit them to God.'

"While Mrs. Seton was consulting Bishop Carroll in regard to the important arrangement suggested by Mr. Dubourg, this gentleman was conferring with the Rev. Messrs. Matignon and Cheverus, of Boston, upon the same subject. After having weighed the matter attentively, they came to the conclusion that her Canada scheme should be abandoned, and that it would be preferable to exert her talents in the way proposed by Mr. Dubourg. Mr. Cheverus wrote to her, 'hoping that this project would do better for her family, and being sure it would be very conducive to the progress of religion in this country.' It was the opinion, however, of these distinguished clergymen that the execution of the design should not be precipitate; and they therefore advised her, through Mr. Dubourg, 'to wait the manifestation of the divine will--the will of a Father most tender, who will not let go the child afraid to step alone.' The wise forethought of Dr. Matignon led him to believe that Mrs. Seton was called, in the designs of God's providence, to be the instrument of some special mercies that he wished to dispense to the church in this country. 'I have only to pray to God,' he wrote to her, 'to bless your views and his, and to give you the grace to fulfil them for his greater glory. You are destined, I think, for some great good in the United States, and here you should remain in preference to any other location. For the rest, God has his moments, which we must not seek to anticipate, and a prudent delay only brings to maturity the good desires which he awakens within us.' Bishop Carroll, in answer to Mrs. Seton's inquiries, informed her that, although he was entirely ignorant of all particulars, yet, to approve the plan of Mr. Dubourg, it was enough for him to know that it had the concurrence of Dr. Matignon and Mr. Cheverus."

She did wait patiently nearly two years. At the end of that time her pecuniary affairs became so embarrassing, and the inconveniences of her situation in New York pressed upon her so severely, that she was again driven to turn her thoughts toward Canada, not so much as a refuge from her own troubles, but as an asylum where her children might be saved from the dangers which threatened their faith in the Protestant society of New York. But about this time she met Mr. Dubourg again, and, in answer to his inquiries, gave him an exact account of her situation. He contemplated the establishment of a Catholic school for girls in Baltimore, and invited her to come and take charge of it. Her two boys he offered to admit into St. Mary's College, free of expense. The school was to be started in a small way, in a two-story hired house; and afterward, if God prospered the undertaking, a proper building for the institution was to be erected on ground belonging to the college. Of course, Mrs. Seton accepted the proposition with joy. On the 9th of June, 1808, she embarked for Baltimore in a packet, accompanied by her three daughters. It was a voyage, in those times, of between six and seven days. She landed on the morning of the 16th, the feast of Corpus Christi, and drove at once from the wharf to St. Mary's chapel to hear mass.

It is almost impossible to describe the happiness which beams from her letters written in her new home to her friends in Italy, her favorite sisters-in-law, Cecilia and Harriet Seton, (the latter of whom was, at this time, strongly attracted toward the church, while the other, as we have already mentioned, was a fervent convert,) and her spiritual advisers. United with her children, in a comfortable little home close to the seminary and college, where she found in the chapel services an unfailing source of delight, she had all that her domestic affections and pious desires could wish. The relatives of Mr. Dubourg and other Catholics of the city treated her with great cordiality, and from many distinguished Protestant families she received marked social attentions. The school was opened in September. Mrs. Seton had not thought, so far, of adopting any thing like a conventual rule of life, except perhaps at some remote period; but her daily life was regulated with reference to the consecration of all her powers to God, and she mingled no further in society than a regard for good breeding and gratitude to her friends absolutely required. The development of her religious schemes was gradual, and the foundation of the new sisterhood appears, from a human point of view, the result of accident and curious coincidence, rather than the fruit of direct labor. The first step toward it was the arrival at Mrs. Seton's Baltimore establishment of a young lady from Philadelphia, named Cecilia O'Conway. The Rev. Mr. Babade, the spiritual director of the school, found this young lady on the point of going to Europe to enter a convent. He told her of Mrs. Seton's plans, and she determined to go to Baltimore instead. In December, 1808, Miss O'Conway accordingly became an assistant in the school.

Mr. Filicchi had made an offering of one thousand dollars toward the realization of Mrs. Seton's plans; but now came, in a most unexpected manner, a new benefactor, whose liberality gave the enterprise a different character and vastly enlarged scope. Among the students of theology at St. Mary's Seminary, was Mr. Samuel Cooper, a gentleman of fortune, a Virginian, and formerly well known in fashionable society. His conversion from Protestantism and determination to study for the priesthood had caused quite as great a sensation as the conversion of Mrs. Seton. He now purposed distributing his property among the poor, (before his death, we may here add, that he literally gave away all he possessed,) and one morning he spoke to Mr. Dubourg about doing something for the instruction of poor children. He had never spoken upon the subject with Mrs. Seton, but he suggested at this interview that possibly she might undertake the work, if he gave the money. It is a very remarkable fact that at this same moment Mrs. Seton was thinking of the same thing. That morning after communion she felt a strong desire arise within her to dedicate herself to the care and instruction of poor girls. She went at once to Mr. Dubourg. "This morning," she said, "in my communion, I thought, 'Dearest Saviour, if you would but give me the care of poor little children, no matter how poor!' and Mr. Cooper being directly before me at his thanksgiving, I thought, 'He has money: if he would but give it for the bringing up of poor little children to know and love you!'" The result of this extraordinary, or we ought rather to say, providential coincidence, was, that Mr. Cooper gave eight thousand dollars for the establishment of the proposed institution, and fixed upon Emmettsburg as the place; and there a farm with a very small stone house upon it was bought, in the names of the Rev. William V. Dubourg, Mr. Samuel Cooper, and the Rev. John Dubois, who was then pastor of several congregations in that part of Maryland, and director at the same time of the small school near Emmettsburg, out of which soon afterward grew Mount St. Mary's College. With the college and its illustrious founder the fortunes of Mrs. Seton's institute became intimately connected.

While these arrangements were in progress, the new community was gradually and quietly forming at the little house in Baltimore. A second associate, Miss Maria Murphy, of Philadelphia, joined Mrs. Seton in April, 1809. In May, two more presented themselves, Miss Mary Ann Butler, of Philadelphia, and Miss Susan Clossy, of New York. It was not without a painful sense of unfitness that, in obedience to the directions of her bishop and spiritual advisers, Mrs. Seton undertook the government of this religious household. On the evening of the day when the task was definitely laid upon her "she was seized," says Dr. White,

"with a transport of mingled love and humility in reflecting upon the subject. Being with two or three of her sisters, and the discourse turning upon the probable designs of providence in their regard, Mother Seton became so penetrated with the awful responsibility, and sense of her own incapacity, that she was almost inconsolable. For some moments she wept bitterly in silence; then, throwing herself upon her knees, she confessed aloud the most frail and humiliating actions of her life from her childhood upward; after which she exclaimed in the most affecting manner, her hands and eyes raised toward heaven and the tears gushing down her cheeks, 'My gracious God! You know my unfitness for this task. I who by my sins have so often crucified you, I blush with shame and confusion! How can I teach others who know so little myself, and am so miserable and imperfect?' The sisters who were present were overwhelmed by the scene before them, and, falling on their knees, gave vent to their tears and painful emotions."

On the 1st of June they assumed a religious habit, and the next day--Corpus Christi--appeared in it for the first time at church. It was not a regular nun's garb, but an imitation of the dress which Mrs. Seton had worn ever since the death of her husband. It consisted of a black gown with a short cape, similar to a costume she had seen in some Italian sisterhood, a white muslin cap with a crimped border, and a black band around the head, fastened under the chin. A regular order of daily life was established, and Mrs. Seton privately, in the presence of Bishop Carroll, took the ordinary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for the period of one year. Her associates, however, did not as yet make any vows, nor was any special religious institute adopted for their organization. They merely styled themselves "Sisters of St. Joseph." Mr. Dubourg was appointed their ecclesiastical superior.

About this time Miss Cecilia Seton fell dangerously ill, and was advised by her physicians to make a visit to Baltimore. Harriet accompanied her, and with these two beloved relatives, one of her daughters, and one member of the sisterhood, Mrs. Seton removed to Emmettsburg on the 21st of June, finding shelter at first in a little log hut on the mountain, as their own house on the farm was not yet ready for use. Her happy union with Cecilia and Harriet was for a few months only. Harriet became a Catholic; but in the first fervor of her devotion was seized with a fever, and died on the 22d of December. Cecilia grew better for a short time, and even joined the community; but she failed gradually, and died in Baltimore in April. During the first autumn and winter at Emmettsburg the institution was little better than a hospital. The farm-house, into which the whole community, then numbering ten, moved in the course of the summer, consisted of nothing but two rooms on the ground floor and two in the attic, and these had to afford accommodations not only for the ten sisters, but for Mrs. Seton's three daughters, her sister-in-law Harriet, and two pupils who followed her from Baltimore. Added to the discomfort of their narrow quarters was a state of poverty so extreme that they sometimes knew not where to look for their next meal. For coffee they substituted a beverage made of carrots and sweetened with molasses. Their bread was of rye and of the coarsest description. At Christmas they thought themselves fortunate in having for dinner smoked herrings and a spoonful of molasses apiece. In the course of the winter, however, a two-story log house of convenient size was put up for their use, and now they were able to open a day-school and take more boarding-pupils, and so provide at least for their daily expenses. The debt incurred in making these improvements was, nevertheless, a severe burden for them, and at one time it seemed inevitable that they should sell out and disperse; but charitable friends came to their relief at the last moment, and, little by little, with many fluctuations of fortune, they got out of their difficulties.

When they determined, about the time of coming to Emmettsburg, to adopt the rule of St. Vincent of Paul, they sent to France and begged some of the sisters of the society to come over and place themselves at the head of the new American community. The invitation was accepted; but the French government would not allow the sisters to sail, so the most that Mrs. Seton could get was a copy of the rules and a kind letter of encouragement. These rules, modified to meet the peculiar wants of the new institution, by permitting it to receive pay-scholars in connection with its labors of charity, and with special provisions to allow Mrs. Seton to devote the necessary care to her young children, were approved by Bishop Carroll as the rule for the "Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph," and so the community which has done such a noble work in the United States came into existence with Mrs. Seton for its first mother superior.

We have no intention of sketching in this brief paper the rise and development of that sisterhood. The log house in "St. Joseph's Valley," at the foot of Mount St. Mary, has a renown in the history of the American church upon which many able pens have enlarged, and branch communities have gone out from it, filling remote parts of the United States with good works and pious example. Our purpose has been merely to sketch the foundation of the illustrious community, and tell our readers something of the trials and sorrows under which Mrs. Seton achieved her great work. The rest of her life, though it was blessed with the consolation of success in her undertaking, was torn with afflictions not less severe than those she had suffered already. Her eldest and her youngest daughters were both taken from her as they were just entering upon a beautiful womanhood, the eldest, Anna, being already a member of the community. The deaths among her earliest associates were many, and she had also to mourn the loss of one of the excellent Italian friends who contributed so much to the success of her enterprise. But in all her sorrows she preserved the calmness of divine resignation, the charm of her personal presence, and the kind, unselfish interest in others which made her so generally beloved. She died on the 4th of January, 1821; and on the wall of the humble chamber where she expired, the following memento is now shown:

"Here, near this door, by this fireplace, on a poor, lowly couch, died our cherished and saintly Mother Seton, on the 4th of January, 1821. She died in poverty, but rich in faith and good works. May we, her children, walk in her footsteps and share one day in her happiness! Amen!"

The two works whose titles we have placed at the head of this article are very much alike in the general character of their contents, having both been prepared from the same materials. Dr. White's Life has been many years before the public, and has been much commended for its devotional spirit and appreciative judgment of Mrs. Seton's labors. The larger work, just issued in two handsome volumes, and printed and bound with considerable elegance, has been prepared by Mrs. Seton's grandson. It has apparently been for the editor a labor of love. He has drawn freely from the family records which Dr. White used before him, and has quoted much more of Mrs. Seton's letters than his predecessor did, so that the work is almost equivalent to an autobiography of the foundress of St. Joseph's, illustrated with abundant explanatory notes, and with only so much narrative as seemed necessary to bind the whole together. It is not only an interesting memorial of a very interesting woman, but an important contribution to the materials which we hope the coming historian will some day reduce into a comprehensive history of the American church.

FOOTNOTE:

[184] Memoir, Letters, and Journal of Elizabeth Seton. Edited by Right Rev. Robert Seton, D.D., Prothonotary Apostolic. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 322, 311. P. O'Shea. 1869.

Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton. By Charles I. White, D.D. 12mo, pp. 462. John Murphy & Co. 1853.

VIEWS OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT.

If we consider the existing industrial nations with the eye of political economy or of political philosophy, we cannot help giving attention to the deep and wide-spread disagreements which have broken open between the laboring man and his employers. In France, Switzerland, Germany, England, and the United States, the question of the relative rights of labor and capital are presented in many ways, so as to compel investigation and action. Trades-unions, coöperative societies, industrial congresses, and lastly, that herculean infant, the Labor Reform Party, are extending themselves all over the countries we have just named, and particularly over the United States. They are daily gaining strength and influence. Politicians are thinking how to obtain the favor of this party, at the least cost to their popularity among other partisans. The larger parties already offer to compromise with it, and to give it a plank in their great platforms. It is evident that, if the working-men were to move with unanimity to form a labor party, it would be a most formidable rival to the others.

The mere fact of the advent of a new party is not at all startling to an American; for since the independence of this country, several parties have come into existence, and have been swept away by the advent or success of others; but the working-men's party proposes to carry into our legislation and into the administration of the government tendencies and principles so diametrically opposite to and destructive of any precedent course or system of politics, that the prospect of these tendencies being powerfully reënforced excites vehement emotions of anxiety or satisfaction, according to the previous bias of the observer. Just think of it: the question is no longer to be only what ought to be the policy of the nation, regarded as an unit, toward other nations or toward itself, nor what are the interests and rights of territorial integers; but what ought to be the action of one great component element upon the other essential elements of the body politic. The people are called upon to consider not only the questions relative to tariffs, taxation, banks, currency, national debt, bonds, State rights, or the like; but to answer the complaint of the bone and sinew of the country against its veins and blood. The brain claims the right to decide; and it appears there is a possibility of there being a preponderance of brain on the side of the complainants. The spread of education produces astonishing consequences; and among the rest this: science is becoming so common that the great cannot monopolize it all, and much of it is going to take service among the poor. Hence, able and eloquent speakers and writers are now contending that labor does not receive its full and merited reward, and that the laborer is oppressed by his employers and the laws. Hence, too, a great number and variety of novel measures and institutions are ingeniously contrived and plausibly advocated for the avowed purpose of overthrowing some of the most venerated doctrines of orthodox political economy.

As in other cases, this movement develops every grade of opinion and feeling. A rich philanthropist thinks more education and better lodging-houses, at less cost, will be a good and sufficient remedy; while among the poor the most violent measures are sometimes preferred. Even agrarianism is proposed, and incendiarism attempted, in order to redress whatever wrongs the toiler really suffers, or imagines he suffers, unjustly. Between the two, we have mild and harmless contrivances, such as mutual aid societies, and coöperative shops and stores, intended to diminish the causes of pauperism or alleviate its bad effects.

All the plans, of course, differ, according to the idea the proposers have formed of the nature of the causes of the social malady. Some regard the miseries of the laboring classes as the accumulated effects of many mere accidents, principally personal imprudence and vice; and, since they think there is no radical cause, refuse to hear of a radical remedy. Others admit radical causes, such as (1) a bad form of government, or (2) the selfish, the uncharitable, the unchristian spirit of the world, or (3) the too rapid increase and local crowding of population, or (4) the progressive individualization of capital, or (5) popular ignorance, or (6) the onerous obligations of marriage and parentage, or (7) what they call the slavery of woman, or (8) the present land-ownership system, or some other prevalent mode of acquiring property, such as (9) usury, (10) monopoly, (11) rents, (12) heirships, (13) tariffs, (14) banking, (15) speculation, and the like. Above all these looms the fact, whatever may be the cause, that capital is becoming less and less in the hands of those who produce it, and is growing larger and larger in the hands of cunning or lucky exploiters.

The variety of opinions with regard to what the remedy should be has produced correspondingly various institutions, parties, and laws. So we have (1) poor laws, vagrant laws, work-houses and reformatory prisons, for juvenile delinquents and others; (2) charity hospitals, asylums for the widows, the orphans, the deaf and dumb, the blind, the crippled, the aged, the infirm, or the insane; warming-houses, lying-in hospitals, poor mothers' cradle-houses, gratuitous sleeping-halls, soup-houses, asylums for unruly or destitute children of both sexes, gratuitous dispensaries of medicines, Magdalen reformatory houses, Sisters of Charity, Brothers of Mercy, Little Sisters of the Poor, Christian Brothers' schools, public schools, etc.; (3) visiting confraternities to bring succor home to the poor, such as fuel-giving, furnishing provisions or nursing, and prison-visiting societies; (4) organizations to support charitable institutions by means of fairs, lotteries, concerts, spectacles, picnics, tournaments, and other amusements; (5) labor-protective unions, workmen's guilds and fellowships, trades-unions and labor combinations, savings banks, coöperative factories, coöperative stores, mutual aid societies, burial societies, labor reform party; (6) Shaker, Rappist, Moravian, and Ballouite communities; (7) Owenite Harmonias, Cabetite Familisteries, Fourierite Phalansterias, women's rights societies, Mormon harems, and artistic brothels of complex association.

Every one who reads this list will find in it the mention of some institution he believes to be either useless or pernicious. The objections would be curiously heterogeneous. An infidel would suppress all those having their root or support in religion. A political economist will protest against working-men's combinations to raise the price of labor. A Christian deplores the attempts of socialists to establish institutions from which God is excluded. A sectarian sees with pain the success of charities founded by other congregations. The Roman Catholic (as such) must also have his opinions of the relative merits of the corporations that appear to him to rise sometimes out of the sea of sin, and sometimes out of the waters of life. We, for ourselves, have some peculiar ideas, gathered from this point of view.

It would be vain obduracy on the part of a Catholic to close his eyes to the deep and wide-spread clamor of the voices, great and small, that are now discussing "social science," and proposing solutions of the "labor question." These matters, in every imaginable manner, are obtruding themselves upon the attention of the manufacturer, politician, and legislator; and must soon command that of the farmer and merchant; and by and by, even the solicitude of the church. Indeed, we should not say "by and by;" for already, while the world is agitated by the strikes and the labor congresses, while the parliament of Great Britain, through its committees, is carrying on the minutest investigations of the eight-hour and higher wages movements, our holy father at Rome has pronounced public allocutions against socialism.

Very certainly society, the state, and the church will soon deeply feel the effects of the agitation of mind and feeling going on among the working people. The allocution of his holiness shows that this consequence has not escaped his penetrating intellect. He sees clearly that the agitation will be injurious or produce beneficial results according to the principles, Christian or anti-christian, that shall prevail within it. To avoid or prevent the fermentation and its products is impossible. It must take place; and the question is, how to make it yield clear and palatable wine. To think that the church can ignore it, and go on as if nothing were shaking the body politic, and disturbing the souls of the people, would be to stultify ourselves. The issue raised is too important, and the tendency to revolution too powerfully pressed to be disregarded and treated with contempt. See the great number of societies the workmen have formed in every Northern State. These societies have already drawn a majority of the skilled operatives, and there is a prospect of their finally absorbing all the working-people. The agricultural laborers already give signs of sympathy with the movement.

Of course, we understand that it matters not to the church what economic or political party governs the state. The controversies between Democrat and Republican, free-trade and protection, labor and capital, are mere worldly matters, and do not concern the church; but the coming issue has a deeper cause than a mere question of temporal expediency. In the midst of the unanimous demand for a change the men of labor are making, we can also perceive, not only that the wished-for changes are fundamental and revolutionary, but also that the leaders are actuated by very different principles, and aim at different ultimates, and that these relate to the very origin, basis, and end of private and public morality and religion. Some move by the light of Christianity, some by that of natural reason as exhibited by the modern infidel schools of philosophy--naturalism, rationalism, individualism, positivism, and evolutionism. Very different motives and very different hopes move the principal agitators, though they now act with great unanimity. The working multitude, who complain of wrong, and seek a practical remedy, have not yet looked beyond the surface of the speeches, or into the details of the plans of their principal men. It suffices that these say they have found the proper remedy. They have gained the confidence of followers merely from evincing a knowledge of the grounds of complaint, and giving eloquent expression to their sympathy. The working-men hardly discuss the merits of the particular methods of reform proposed; and they will follow one or the other class of leaders as it happens that either succeeds in captivating them by the arts of ambition. The difference in the possible consequences is immense; but first the leaders, each with his followers, will act together to break up the customs, laws, and institutions by which the interests of the laboring men are injuriously affected; and not till they accomplish this against the common enemy shall we know (unless we prepare the way) whether the counsels of infidelity or of Christianity will be followed in the reconstruction.

The work of determining the tendency one way or the other is going on even now. If we scrutinize societies, institutions, and parties formed for the purpose of relieving the evils that poverty causes among the people, we shall find it easy to class them under discordant heads. (1) Those founded by Christian charity, wholly innocent of any political purpose--works of disinterested mercy and brotherly love. (2) Those invented by political economists and lawyers, merely as a means of favoring capitalists and the personal accumulation of property, or to suppress pauperism and vagrancy, such as monopolies, poor-houses, and the like. (3) Those contrived from motives of private prudence and economy only, such as mutual aid societies, coöperative stores, etc. (4) Those proceeding on the ground that the laboring classes will never get their just portion of worldly goods and enjoyments otherwise than through political action, as, for instance, the national labor reform party. (5) The Utopias and secret societies imagined by infidels.

It is this last-mentioned class whose theories, acts, and progress compel us to consider them from a religious point of view. They are the offspring of Campanella, of Nicolas of Munster, and of Giordano Bruno. From these sprang Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Holbach, and a host of mere sceptics and speculators like them. Then came the chiefs of the French revolution, Marat and Robespierre. Next, in 1797, Baboeuf opposed even Robespierre as being too backward and aristocratic, and formed a conspiracy to massacre the rich, and proclaim sumptuary laws from a mountain of the slain. After him appeared Owen, trying to realize the insane idea of conciliating atheism with charity. He was followed by St. Simon, who sought to create another contradiction, that of an aristocracy of philanthropists; governors and princes of equality, who, however, never found any subjects. Contemporaneously, Fourier invented a wonderful scheme for procuring in labor association the most luxurious pleasures and licentious indulgences. Close at his heels came Cabet, continuing Owen's method on less offensive conditions. Last of all, Noyes is trying to conceal the wolf of beastly promiscuousness under the robe of the pure lamb of Christian love. These are the most notorious of those who may be denounced as the anti-Christian agitators of the labor question. Socialism is the name they have inscribed on their banner; and hence, since all these inventors and champions have also been unanimous in waging war, directly or indirectly, against Christianity, their socialism itself should be opposed by all good Christians.

But, unfortunately, socialism, while opposing or seeking to undermine Christianity, succeeds in seducing many by the promises of sensual enjoyments she makes. Indeed, the rationale of every sect or party concerned in the labor movement begins with the main proposition which makes them and even infidel socialism acceptable to multitudes, namely, that society or the state is under obligation to relieve the miseries of the poor, and if possible to eradicate pauperism itself. If any deny that society or the law has done any injustice to labor--if, for instance, the legislator who framed the poor laws thought the pauper had nobody but himself to blame--he nevertheless admits that pauperism is not merely a personal misfortune, but a public one; that pauperism must be regarded as a social malady or sore, which, though it may not be radically cured, must and ought to be treated at least with palliatives, so as to prevent it from becoming fatal to the body politic. Thus, while attempting to exonerate the state, even the orthodox politician admits that the body politic is deeply afflicted by the virus of pauperism, and therefore himself posits the very question he would fain ignore. The poor join issue with him, and argue that from the day England and North Germany wrested the care of the poor from the monasteries, the state assumed the responsibility of their distress, and is bound to make such laws as will radically cure all misery. The contest is now raging in every direction, not only on the question of Who shall take care of the poor, but How shall they be cared for, and What are the rights and remedies they are entitled to?

The origin and object of the controversy is agreed on by every one. The dissent is upon what shall be the principle and the method according to which the desired relief shall be gained. Infidelity, under the name of socialism, would have it done without God, on grounds of naked natural equity or rational justice. It would act independently of religion, Christian faith and Christian charity. It would push the church aside, and presume to finish in another name the work our Lord Jesus Christ commenced more than eighteen centuries ago.

Hence, unless one prefers to hide his head in the sand, with the vain notion that the immense flood roaring and rising round us does not exist, because he does not see or hear it, it is time for him, if he is a Catholic, to consider from the point of view of his faith what stand he should take, and what is his duty toward the poor and toward society in the crisis the struggles of laborers for power in the state will soon bring on in this country of universal suffrage. It is not merely a question of giving and distributing alms and assistance that is to be solved, but great problems of social organization and rights are put before us. We must decide, (1) what there is in the labor movement that religion approves and encourages; (2) what there is in it religion condemns; and (3) what it contains that is merely temporal or indifferent to the church.

It certainly has something of each of these three elements.

In any way the matter is approached it presents a religious as well as a political question to be solved, a religious as well as a political duty to be performed; for it involves the rights of the poor on us, and our duty to them as Christians. What if the demands of the laborers were just, and that, notwithstanding this, we should oppose them? While socialism, as a whole, should be opposed, it is admitted that the present poor-laws and charitable institutions are insufficient, and some more thorough system of relief must be adopted. The working-men insist that this shall be done, and for this purpose claim to elect those who are to govern the state, and make the laws. Religion cannot neglect to interfere without leaving multitudes of souls of the poor to be seduced into the naturalism, sensualism, and infidelity the socialists purpose as the consummation of the movement. Nor does the question of our religious duty toward the poor in this crisis cease to demand an answer upon a mere refutation of socialistic theories. It does not suffice to show that the Utopias of Baboeuf, Owen, Cabet, St. Simon, Fourier, and Noyes are abominable, but the just principle of economic distribution must be found and applied under penalty of eternal anarchy. The negation of one medicine as unfit does not dispense from finding another that will cure, when, indeed, a disease exists; and we take it for granted that no Christian who has heard or read of the successive burdens and hardships of the poor operatives and peasants of Europe will say that there is no disease to be cured, or who is heartless enough to abandon the case on the ground that it is incurable. Certain it is that the hard-working poor will not concede that they suffer no injustice--will not cease to demand permanent relief; and if religion ignores, denies, or abandons the sick, they will resort to philosophical quacks, who will lead them to their moral and religious ruin. Worse; as foreseen by his holiness Pius IX., they will repeat the apostasy of the French revolution, and with the same sacrilegious and despotic spirit, but with more cunning and method, prohibit religion itself.

Their main lever in accomplishing this will be the labor movement, if they succeed in controlling it. Hence, what we shall do with it, is a question of vital importance.

At the outset the Catholic must give a negative answer to all propositions and plans for disturbing vested rights or violently resisting the laws, or lawful authority, under pretence of establishing justice. This proposition needs no argument to show its wisdom and conformity with divine law.

Next, the Catholic will oppose agrarianism, which is the forcible taking of all property to distribute it in equal portions among the people. This is forced equality; a very different thing from associated labor.

Finally, the Catholic will also even oppose association when she would organize corruption and irreligion under the guise of philanthropy and fraternity.

No doubt these are the features of the labor movement his holiness Pius IX. designated under the general title of socialism when, on the 17th of June last, in his allocution to the cardinals, he said:

"Thus, to-day we see on one side revolution, bringing in her train THAT socialism which repudiates morals and religion and denies God himself; while on the other side we behold the faithful and true, who calmly and firmly expect that good principles will resume their salutary empire, and that the merciful designs of Deity will be realized."

The plain duty of lopping off socialism, and of casting it aside, being performed, there remains, (1) reform through just legislation; (2) legal contracts for mutual relief; (3) coöperation or association of work-fellows; and (4) the realization of perfect Christian charity.

We think we could prove that all the purely secular remedies--such as coöoperation, mutuality, and the like--are delusive, and in themselves inadequate; but it is not our present purpose to examine this branch of the subject. A volume would not suffice. It is only necessary to remark, en passant, that there is nothing in the organizations included under the general name of coöperation contrary to religion; but at the same time there is nothing in coöperation that springs from religion; it is a mere economic contrivance. It is not a religious solution of the problem of social distress; and since we have argued that religion must be able to give a temporal as well as a spiritual answer to the complaints of the poor, we will pass by all minor and transitional questions, and consider only what the earthly Utopia of faith and charity would be; and inquire what method might now be adopted to inaugurate the practical reign of Christian fellowship, in which the laborer would necessarily reap the reward he is justly entitled to.

Yes, religion has also its earthly new Eden, that will give full satisfaction to the over-burdened and under-paid workman. Let us try to picture it in our imagination, in order to judge from a study of the ideal whether it would be possible to make it a reality. To do this, we should begin by stating the principles on which this ideal should be founded; and we should also mention such historical facts as may serve to enlighten us on the practical application of those principles.

The Scriptures and the church teach that there are degrees of merit, beginning with that minimum of righteousness sufficient to save us from damnation. From that point the degrees rise one above the other till they ascend beyond the regions of prohibition and precept to the realms of counsel and perfection. There is the man who is willing to obey God so far only as to refrain from violating the ten commandments. Then there are those who, besides this, give alms and do other works of mercy for Christ's sake; and finally, there are those who, seeking for the Holy Spirit, labor for and do works necessary to attain perfection.

Excuse this positing of doctrines familiar to us all. They are stated as parts of our argument.

Among the immediate disciples of Christ there were not only shepherds, mechanics, fishermen, physicians, and farmers; but also tradesmen, and even lawyers and soldiers. Some were rich, and nevertheless were regarded as having merited heaven. Zaccheus is an instance of this class; to please God, he gave as much as half of his goods to the poor. He went only half-way in perfection. It is clear that if people generally refrained from committing any of the offences mentioned in the ten commandments, justice would reign, and therefore many social grievances of the worst kind would disappear. True, this would not suffice to give affirmative happiness, but it would be the negation of positive moral woe. Works of mercy are necessary to dry all tears; and charity has the genial warmth that makes the smile bloom again on the countenances of those who have wept. Now, charity is first pity and sympathy; and then it is sacrifice. It has beautiful demonstrations of love in words and demeanor, but it fully realizes itself in sacrifices; and these sacrifices are of every extent. Some are small but cheerfully offered, as the widow's mite. Some are proportionately large, as the apportionment Zaccheus made; but some are unlimited, as the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience of the regular clergy.

Jesus said to him, If thou wilt be PERFECT, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor; and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, and follow me. (Matt. xix. 21.) Blessed are ye (willingly) poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke vi. 20; Matt. v. 3.) Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also. (Matt. vi. 21.) You cannot serve God and Mammon. (Matt. vi. 24.) He who hath left house, etc., ... for my sake and for the gospel, ... shall ... receive a hundred times as much, now in this time; ... and in the world to come life everlasting. (Mark x. 29, 30.)

From these and numerous similar speeches of our Lord, and from a spirit of gratitude, his disciples were inspired with the desire of attaining perfection. Those who remained steadfast notwithstanding the crucifixion, or rather because of the crucifixion, gathered around the apostles and pronounced the vow of poverty. "All they that believed were together, and had all things in common." (Acts ii. 44.)

This is the first instance of real communism that ever occurred in the world, and it was the logical product of the teachings of our Lord and his apostles. That it was the logical product, could be easily shown by argument on the language of Scripture; but it suffices that it was approved by Peter and the other apostles. They knew best; and, indeed, gave example by becoming members of the community. That it was the first instance of real communism, we assert without forgetting the Essenes, the Lacedemonians, and the like, from whose systems it is easy to distinguish the apostolic community of goods.

And here we ask particular attention to the grand and glorious trait which distinguishes Christian reductionism[185] from socialism, agrarianism, coöperation, and all other worldly plans of association.

The object of worldly association is merely to benefit its own members in secular welfare. It has no outflowing. It is a partnership for distribution of products, profits, pleasure, or knowledge among the members, contributors, or coöperators only. Thus it was with the Essenes. The principle and purpose of their community of goods was not the extension of its benefits to the neighbor. They had and enjoyed their wealth among themselves exclusively. Their associations were just as selfish as any individual; the only difference being that in one case it is a single person and in the other a company that is selfish, and clannishly withholds its own from the rest of the world. They did not practise true charity, that charity which goes beyond home. The communication of the Essenes began and ended at home. It did not, therefore, resemble the Christian charity described by St. Paul; they had no idea of it. Modern society has many examples of participation like that of the Essenes. The free-masons and other mutual aid societies are of this kind.

Of course, reciprocity or coöperation existed in the apostolic community; but this was only incidental and secondary. One of the main elements of charity is its universality, and therefore it extends far beyond mere mutuality. It gives--it is not a contract of exchange or insurance. Associations of the Christian kind do not limit themselves to themselves. Besides mutual help, they give help to any and all men. Indeed, most frequently Christian charitable institutions entirely lose sight of any mutuality. The members, as it were, forget themselves individually, think of no restitution, and have their whole attention and sentiments, with those of the company, fixed beyond their own wants and upon the alleviation of the burdens and pains of the poor in general. Every reader knows of many illustrations of this difference. We need not mention particular cases.

Indeed, the very nature of Christian charity precludes the limiting of benefits to the members of a society. Therefore, the moment any company resolves to contribute or work for the purpose of a division among its own members exclusively, it can have no claim to be acting on the principle of charity. Charity ignores any such distinction; she tends toward all men indiscriminately; she feels for them all alike, as brethren and neighbors; she sympathizes with all; she is spontaneous, she is expansive, she radiates. She loves; and her love overflows: then runs in diverging rills to every door.

Association recommends itself to the Christian from other considerations than those of economy, security against want, multiplication of productions, and increase of wealth. He enters into association to increase his power with God, to attract grace, to set up a common defence against sin, to have the strength of union against Satan, to have more time and opportunity to do good, and to do it more efficiently. The fundamental motive of the Christian throughout is love of God and man, piety and mercy. It is the spirit of sacrifice; it is actuated by no prospect of self-advantage; or, at worst, it expects personal advantage only through and under the universal good. This was the absolute self-abnegation and exuberance of love out of which the apostolic community spontaneously sprang.

It is an error to suppose that the primitive Christians abandoned their community of things upon their first dispersion or flight from persecution. (Acts viii. 1.) It continued long afterward, as we learn from the fathers of the church. Justin Martyr, (Apol. c. 2,) describing Christian society as it was in his time, (A.D. 150,) says,

"We who formerly delighted in adultery, now observe the strictest chastity; we who used the charms of magic, have devoted ourselves to the true God; and we who valued money and gain above all things, now cast what we have in common, and distribute to every man according to his necessities."

The writings of other primitive fathers contain similar passages.

It needs no argument to make a Catholic see how the solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience must be a development or consequence of the manners and customs of the primitive Christians. Even in Justin's time, community of goods was the prevailing practice among Christians; but as the faith spread itself widely, and as whole nations were converted, the great majority were incapable of that intense zeal and of those aspiring sentiments that may achieve perfection. Those who aimed so high were in a small minority when counted apart from the total population; and they found it necessary to seek freedom and escape persecution by resorting to solitude, or to fortify themselves against the general lukewarmness by solemn vows, or to resist the influence of the world by separate association. Hence, at first, those who sought to attain perfection fled to the desert, imitating the ancient prophets. They were the Theban hermits or anchorites. Then appeared companionship in mortification in the unital homes of the cenobites and monks. Then, long afterward, came the companies of militant charity: the Jesuits, Sisters of Charity, Lazarists, and many others.

Persons who wish to rise above the ordinary degree of piety, above the common level of Catholic practice, generally attempt full perfection. Animated by the spirit of self-sacrifice and an ardent desire to imitate our Lord, they not only devote themselves to poverty and obedience, but also to chastity. They are not content with less than the three vows, the fulness of perfection.

Just here, we wish the reader's attention to an important point, through which we expect to arrive at a solution of the questions propounded in the beginning of this article. It is that, though generally we see the "three vows" practised together, we would be in error if we supposed that they are inseparable, and that Catholicity admits only of the two extremes--the common level or triple perfection. On the contrary, among the wonders and beauties of Catholicity there is the wonder and the beauty of her myri-multiform adaptability to the holy wants of all dispositions, tastes, and nationalities. The plasticity with which Catholicity suits herself (without deterioration and with always an upward tendency) to every degree and variety, of practical virtue, is marvellous. She is, indeed, all things to all men without ceasing to be the spouse of Christ. Hence, within her fold there are, besides the common law of faith and discipline, multitudes of approved forms of devotion, giving egress and exteriority to every peculiarity of good impulse the soul may experience. There are saints of every trade, occupation, habitude, and condition to be imitated. There are many kinds of confraternities, sodalities, societies, and orders--both lay and clerical--formed to accomplish every good work. The number of these ways, rules, methods, forms, and associations is so great, a description of them all fills volumes.

Sometimes a number of laymen combine to do a charitable work without forming any vow. Often they make only simple vows; but many engage themselves by solemn vows. In some cases the counsel of chastity is followed without that of poverty; the secular priesthood is an example of this kind. Sometimes the vow of poverty has been made without that of celibacy, as in the case of Ananias and Saphira.

St. Barnabas, in the first century; Saints Justin, Julian, and Lucian, in the second century; Saint Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and St. Cyprien, in the third century; and Arnobius and Lactantius, in the fourth century, say (Bergier, vol. i. p. 380) that between Christians all things were in common; but we easily gather from other statements and allusions in their works that they did not mean a community by virtue of any positive RIGHT or precept. They meant the generous liberality, the voluntary self-sacrifice, that characterized the manners and customs of the Christians. None asserted conjoint ownership or other title to their neighbor's property, nor did any pretend to demand authoritatively, as the obligation of a contract, a participation or use exigible by virtue of the membership of Christ; but all, actuated by Christian fellow-feeling, gave spontaneously and freely, so that none were allowed to suffer from want of subsistence. The effect was the same, or better, than if all things were in common by virtue of a legal obligation or contract. It was the same as if all Christians had made a solemn vow to deprive themselves, in order to be able to relieve all cases of suffering poverty they knew of. The vow of poverty has no other temporal object. Its theory is the doctrine of charity, not that of any natural social right.

Gradually this unmeasured charity appeared to diminish; for the whole empire being theoretically though not practically converted to Christianity, the Christians at heart were lost in the immense crowd of merely nominal believers, and were but partially able to know each other and communicate. At the same time, so widely and deeply corrupt were the people, even the poor, that charity herself was forced to be cautious. In fact, the number of sincere Christians, and therefore of charitable persons, had not diminished; but was so small in proportion to the number of the distressed, that even by bestowing their all they could produce no sensible diminution of the general misery.

The situation was almost identical with that of the present time; and the plainest remedy would have been then, as it would be now, a great augmentation of the number of Christians imbued with the spirit of charity and disposed to self-sacrifice.

The Catholic Church made many glorious efforts to effect this cure by increasing the number of the faithful and true, and by organizing her charitable agencies. She gave birth to those missions and institutions by which the spiritual nature and intention of Christianity was preserved, perpetuated, and disseminated, even through barbarian conquest and feudal oppression. To be able to devote themselves to promoting their own and their neighbor's salvation, and to help the sick, the oppressed, and the poor, the members of the monastic and chivalric orders generally bound themselves by "three vows;" and if they ever omitted any one of the three, it was the vow of poverty. The holy knights, for instance, frequently vowed themselves to chastity and obedience; but not always to poverty. Chastity and obedience are not considerably thwarted by the possession of worldly riches; and they may without very serious detriment dispense with the restraints of poverty: but poverty is very difficult without chastity; for the hardships of poverty are grievously multiplied by the necessity of providing for a family. Hence, even in the remotest times, the orders have added the vow of chastity to that of poverty.

Doubtless there have been, since apostolic times, many isolated instances of the vow of poverty being made by an entire FAMILY. Among the tertiary or lay brethren of the regular orders, cases of such a combination might easily have happened. We take it for granted that if a husband and wife make the vow of poverty, they would (if otherwise correct) be accepted as a tertiary or lay brother and sister of any regular order bound by the three vows, such as the Franciscans, Jesuits, etc. We know, however, of only one recorded instance of there having existed, since apostolic times, a distinctly and duly organized congregation, sodality, company, or community of married Catholics living under the obligations of a solemn or even simple vow of poverty. The schismatics or heretics cannot even adduce a single instance; for, as already noted, their societies are not willingly poor, but the object of their association is comfort and wealth.

The one instance I refer to is that of the Jesuit REDUCTIONS in Paraguay.

Yet, long before the beautiful results obtained by the Jesuit fathers in Paraguay, the good such establishments might do had been clearly foreseen by excellent and learned Catholics. That confessor of the faith, Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded by Henry VIII. for refusing the oath of supremacy, wrote the first Utopia, founded on the idea of a community of goods among a whole people. Since that day the idea has fermented, and will not allow the world to rest until it is practically fulfilled by a Christian people; for it is a Christian idea, based only on Christian motives, and wholly impracticable outside of the Christian religion. It was to emulate the example set by the Jesuits that several Christian, though schismatic or heretical, societies have been partially successful in realizing this idea. These are the Moravians, Rappists, Shakers, and Ballouists; but we are satisfied the work of realization must be resumed by Catholic hands, and with Catholic motives, and on Catholic grounds, before it can be permanently and beautifully successful.

Here several questions present themselves together:

1. What are the distinctive motives and grounds of an apostolic reduction to the rule of community?

2. What essential Catholic conditions should the organic rule of such an establishment embody?

3. Would such establishments tend to disseminate the faith and strengthen the church?

4. Are the times propitious, and do surrounding circumstances demand missionary attention to this matter?

5. Is there place in the economy of the church militant for the operation of communities of families having property in common?

We fear that the editor would not allow the space necessary for an elaborate answer to these questions. We will therefore endeavor to be very brief.

1. A socialist would say that the only motive for association is a desire to better our worldly condition; that, therefore, association is recommendable only so far as it facilitates increased production, thorough economy, equitable distribution, and greater security; and that it is only by convincing men of these tangible advantages that they will be induced to give up individualism for combinism. So their phalansteries and familisteries are nothing but contrivances to save and gain time, labor, and money for the benefit of the company, and in rivalry with, and exclusive of, every other company and the remainder of mankind. It is only the old principle of self-interest, covetousness, greed of gain, love of money, exercised by partnerships or corporations instead of single persons. Thus, some of these companies will get very rich, while others, though burning with covetousness and discontent, will fall into great poverty. But besides selfish motives moving men, there are others more powerful and certainly more Christian. For instance, a catholic community of goods would rest on directly the opposite of self-interest, and be induced by charity counteracting the excess of egoism. True, as in the other case, association would be only a means, and also a guarantee of safety, economy, and increase; but how different the ulterior object! The final causes of a catholic "reduction" to community of goods would be: (1) to live apart from the evil example of the world; (2) to sustain and encourage one another in the faith and its practices; (3) to secure the rearing of children in the practice of religion; (4) to be able to hear mass oftener, and indulge more frequently and expansively in prayer and other sweet and consoling devotions; (5) to save and increase wealth indeed, though not for self, not for the company and its members beyond the absolute necessities of life, but for external charity--distribution among the poor neighbors, or the establishment of similar companies; (6) the "reductionists" (We venture to generalize the name they had in Paraguay) would work in a spirit of self-sacrifice to please God; (7) they would offer up their voluntary privations as acts of love, penance, and prayer; (8) they would be actuated by aspirations to merit grace and attain perfection; (9) be moved by a desire to display faith before the world, and to concentrate its light so that it might radiate far and wide; and finally, (10,) they would cherish the thought that their zeal might be efficient in strengthening the influence, facilitating the operations, and increasing the glory of the church. What an immense difference between reductionism and socialism!

2. The essential conditions of such an association would be the vows of poverty and obedience, under such sanctions and guarantees and inspired by such hopes as only the Catholic Church can give; and, since the society would admit persons living in marriage, and since the church teaches the indissolubility of the marriage-tie, the unity of the consent of husband and wife to the acceptance of these vows previous to admission. The vow of poverty would be a sine qua non, since without it the society would be liable to the precariousness of all secular enterprises; and since, also, without this vow the society would not have the mark, the trait, the essential quality that distinguishes disinterested reductionism from riches-and-comfort-seeking socialism. The vow of obedience to a superior authority, such as a clerical director or a bishop, is also indispensable. Those who have had opportunity of observing the interior operation of a socialist or Protestant association must be fully sensible of the importance of this condition. They are distracted by divided counsels, inconsistencies of purpose, obstinacy and pride of opinions, rival ambitions, and the like. The end is generally ruin. They only succeed in proportion to such modicum of humility and obedience as they have contrived to incorporate in their rules and intention. Sometimes it is only the acknowledged superiority and energy of character of a founder or leader that preserves the organization. As soon as this personage dies, his creature goes also into dissolution. Hence, we say the vital conditions of a "reduction" are, (1) Christian fervor; (2) Christian humility; (3) Christian marriage; (4) Christian poverty, and (5) Catholic obedience.

3. We have before us an account of the Paraguay missions, from which we copy the following passage, (p. 52),

"It sometimes happened that the number thus collected was far too great to admit of their being received as permanent dwellers in the 'reduction;' and in this case their instructors would furnish all that was needed for the founding of a new one, not only supplying corn, cattle, and clothing from their own stores, but giving what, to an Indian, was most difficult to bestow, their active and personal coöperation in building a new 'reduction.'"

This extract answers the question whether such a company would tend to disseminate the faith and strengthen the church. The process of increase would be in geometrical proportion. Each reduction would have several offspring, and these, in turn, would also each evolve several others. This was the case in Paraguay. There, in a few years, the reductions became so numerous that they lined the banks of the Parana and Uruguay, extended far into the interior, and, in the words of an historian, formed "a Christian republic, where, far from the dwellings and evil designs of the colonists, the spirit of the primitive church revived." Alas! that this caused the envy and jealousy of the world of avarice and ambition. In one more generation, if the Jesuit fathers had not been banished, the Christian republic would have been permanently established. The glorious example they set should not remain fruitless. There is a possibility of similar work and similar results in the midst of the moral desert of civilization. It is time that the shepherds should gather their lambs into visible and safer folds. The lambs should not be left to straggle among the wolves of this moral wilderness. Surely the fact of these straggling members of the flock being married should be no objection to their being provided with a refuge when the couple seek it with unity of will, and would fain find in it the opportunity of serving God. Surely, the fructification of such a work would be wonderful; for its beneficence and Christian spirit would be so apparent that thousands of poor Catholics would eagerly join it, and tens of thousands of lost sheep would be reconverted so as to follow the religious and beautiful life thus made practically possible. This power of multiplying themselves, this productiveness by thirty, seventy, and a hundred fold, is a peculiarity of this kind of association; for, while socialistic and coöperative societies are concentric, a Christian association or reduction, by virtue of its voluntary self-privation and consequent making of a disposable surplus, and by virtue of its desire to bestow in charity this surplus, is evolutive and prolific.

4. Surrounding circumstances in these times not only demand the attention of the church to the subject of association, but the world now offers facilities which, though very different from those that existed in Paraguay, are far more favorable and congenial. In Paraguay, the reverend fathers found people capable of discipline, but barbarous, ignorant, and suspicious. In civilization to-day, instead of savage ignorance, we see foolish infidelity and moral corruption; but, at the same time, a belief in the benefits of association is spreading itself continually. This belief evinces itself in every direction. It resolves and attempts a great many forms of combination. The conviction that good will flow from the industrial association of those who labor is becoming more and more intense. Several secular efforts, based on mere worldly advantage or mutuality, have proved seriously successful. The tendency of work and business is toward the organization of corporations. The capitalists have set the example by their monster companies and monopolies. The plain deduction is, that this tendency affords a favorable opportunity for forming reductions. To neglect it would be to neglect making all things work together unto good to such as, according to God's purpose, are called to be saints. (Rom. viii. 28.)

5. To say that there is no place for communities of families in the economy of the church, would be to deny her beautiful adaptability to all grades and varieties of virtue and good works. That she should reject and oppose socialism, with its cortége of free love, heresy, blasphemy, covetousness, naturalism, and woman's dispersion, let us loudly declare; but to say that there should be in the system of the church a place only for such apostolic communities as are composed of celibates, would be to condemn her history, which tells us of the community at Jerusalem, and of the reductions of Paraguay. We cannot suppose there is a grade or kind of real perfection that the church would reject, if, indeed, that grade or kind be in conformity with evangelical counsel. It is said that keeping the vow of poverty would be too hard for married people, who are naturally impelled to seek riches for the sake of their children. It is said that parental bias, solicitude, and duty would create great obstacles, hard to be overcome. Supposing this, still we say, all things are possible with God. The merit of those who, with God, could conciliate these two obligations, and accomplish both, would only be greater in the eyes of the church. Certainly, no Catholic will say that the counsels in regard to voluntary poverty are meant only for celibates, and that only celibates are entitled to gain the consequent blessings. "Blessed are the" willingly "poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Certainly, a man and wife are entitled to earn the benefits of this willing poverty as well as any monk or nun. The married poor are entitled to make the same sacrifice and take part in the same work to enhance the glory of the church, and to merit the same reward. Association makes the sacrifice and the work possible to the celibate. It creates a similar possibility for married people. The wondrous powers of combined labor and economy are well known. The fields in that direction are wide and free, and ready for good seed. Instead of thinking that associations of married people are in any wise incompatible with Catholic doctrine and discipline, a little reflection will convince us that it is, on the contrary, the long-neglected link that completes the circle of good works. Infidels would fain seize the position, and try to adapt it to naturalism and cupidity; but their attempts have been simply ridiculous. The reason is obvious: the vow of poverty and all its consequences is possible only in and through the motives inspired by the Christian religion. They cannot exist and cannot be imitated outside. True association, that which is productive of moral good and social happiness, that which springs from charity, belongs to Christianity, and it is impossible to separate it from her. It was practised by the primitive disciples, it was praised and taught by the fathers of the church, it was and still is fulfilled by the celibates in the monasteries, it was successfully applied in the reductions to a whole people; and we conclude that the place once occupied by saintly tribes and families under the wing of the church is still vacant and open to their return and reëstablishment.

FOOTNOTE:

[185] We make the word from the name the Jesuit fathers gave to their establishments in Paraguay. They called them Reductions.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF POLAND.

America owes a debt of gratitude to the Polish nation. In the darkest days of our struggle for independence many brave Poles came to our assistance. The name of Pulaski stands among the most honored names of the Revolution. To-day we are on a most friendly footing and possess much influence with Russia. She is crushing Poland to the earth in a manner which is a disgrace to the nineteenth century. Shall we be silent when our voice might bring aid to a noble but unfortunate people, who generously assisted us in the hour of need? Justice and gratitude both forbid.

The unprecedented and truly pitiful condition to which the former Polish provinces have been reduced by Muscovite tyranny makes it a duty, which we owe likewise to our common humanity, to direct attention to that ill-used country, and to illustrate somewhat in detail the intolerable religious, political, and social chaos into which it has been precipitated. The idea of restoring the ancient Sarmatian monarchy to its territorial integrity might justly be deemed Utopian; but we have still the right to insist, in the name of every recognized principle of moral and public law, that the inconsequence and barbarity with which Russian Poland, and especially Congress Poland, is now being treated, should cease. No one capable of appreciating the extent of the evil can fail to perceive that such an anomalous state of things as there obtains is absolutely insufferable, and that even Muscovite brutality cannot much longer expect to avert another revolution. The eventualities of the Polish question demand, therefore, for this reason alone, the serious and early interference of the great powers.

To enable the reader to arrive at a thorough understanding of the question, it is necessary that we should commence by casting a brief glance at the present religious condition of the country. It is well known that the Roman Catholic Church, which is professed by six sevenths of the Christian and five sevenths of the total population of the kingdom--the church which has the deepest and strongest hold upon the social and historical life, the customs and character of the nation--has, during the last six years, been systematically degraded, both de facto and officially, to the rank of a mere schism. The Archbishop of Poland, expressly selected for the primacy by the Emperor Alexander on account of his probity and virtues, was deposed after a twelve months' incumbency without charges, trial, or sentence. The sole excuse for this harsh treatment was that he presumed to remonstrate against the extreme severity with which the most trivial political offences of his countrymen were punished. The venerable prelate is now a close prisoner of state in the interior of Russia. His place in the archiepiscopal palace is filled by a Russian, Tschinownik, of the Greek orthodox stamp, who wields absolute sway over the "sectarian" churches--as the Roman Catholic and the evangelic are called--and entertains a select circle of friends with Russo-French amateur theatricals in the apartments in which Tijalewski and Felinski once meditated and prayed.

The treatment meted out to the other patriotic bishops has been marked by a similarly brutal and vindictive spirit. Some of them are prisoners in Siberia; some, like Bishop Lubinski, have died on the way out; some languish in foreign exile. Their dioceses have been conferred on ecclesiastics who are in the interest of Russia, and therefore execrated and despised as traitors by their own countrymen. All intercourse and dealings between the Catholic hierarchy in Poland and the see of Rome have been interdicted and rendered almost impossible. With a view of preserving appearances, a Catholic synod has, by force and threats, been convened under the auspices of the imperial government at St. Petersburg. The members of this body have been clothed with jurisdiction in all ecclesiastical affairs. The lower clergy, stripped of their revenues and endowments, have been made dependent on a state subsidy, which may be withdrawn at discretion by the temporal authorities. Laymen, without properly defined duties and powers, completely ignorant of the wants and aims of the church, preside over the priesthood and prescribe the ritual and the ecclesiastical discipline. The majority of the convents and religious houses, as well as the schools connected with them, have been closed, and the superintendence which the religious formerly exercised over the education and training of youth has been entirely taken away. A number of the finest Roman Catholic church edifices has been appropriated for the use of the Greek Orthodox Church, which has in addition been endowed out of the property and funds of the former. The concordat with Rome has been abrogated, and though the St. Petersburg cabinet denies that M. de Meyendorff, its ambassador to the holy see, told the supreme pontiff to his face that "Catholicism is synonymous with revolution," yet the treatment of the Catholic Church of Poland has been exactly in accordance with such a theory. The United Greek Church, previously on the most cordial terms with her Roman relative and the Polish nationality, has been entirely estranged from Rome, and placed under the influence of anti-Polish, Russo-maniac Ruthenians, expressly imported with this view from Galizia. With such spiritual guides to direct them, it was expected that many would be gradually brought over to the Greek Church, as had indeed been attempted once before, but with rather indifferent success, in Lithuania, during the reign of the Emperor Nicholas. But we need not enlarge on this theme. Whole volumes might be filled with accounts of the persecutions to which the national church and her servants have been subjected by the Russian government. Who does not still remember the heart-rending scenes enacted at Warsaw during the revolutionary years, when the Cossacks forced their way into the sanctuaries and dragged thousands of worshippers from the steps of the altar to the dungeons of the citadel, or the still more recent attempt to compel the Catholic clergy to perform divine service in the Russian language? These specimens of Muscovite tyranny in times of peace have sent a thrill of horror and loathing throughout the entire Christian world, and are still too fresh in the memory of the living to be forgotten.

Passing from the spiritual administration of the kingdom to the temporal, we find it intrusted to a class of men who are as hostile and foreign to the nation as to every established theory of good government. This is especially the case in the provinces, where all the authority rests in the hands of Stock-Russians, natives of a country whose political and economical systems, whose physical and historical life, whose character, customs, laws, views, ideas, etc., are in every respect the very opposite to those of Poland. Selected almost exclusively from among the subalterns of the army, their profession has taught them to laugh at civil and constitutional guarantees, to disregard the delicately adjusted and carefully balanced interests of the community, and it is therefore not surprising that their misgovernment should exceed all belief. Of the wisdom, moderation, and forbearance which the peculiar state of affairs in Poland demands, there is no trace. It matters very little that Field-Marshal Count Berg, the viceroy of the kingdom, and some of the generals who preside over certain branches of the administration, should personally be honest, conscientious, well-meaning, and just men. The training, antecedents, principles, and habits of their subordinates are such as unfit them for civil positions. Yet this deplorable want of all administrative talent and experience in the colonels, captains, and lieutenants who are appointed to govern the provinces, does not constitute the greatest and most serious objection to them. Besides the very small amount of intelligence possessed by the average Russian subaltern, he is noted for some far more offensive traits. This class is proverbial for its rapacity, dishonesty, venality, intemperance, and immorality; and as every Russian looks upon himself in the light of a conqueror among a treacherous, rebellious people, he naturally regards all Poles, and especially the refined and educated among them, as his personal enemies, whom he only refrains from plundering and oppressing so long as he is bribed.

Before the insurrection of 1863, the administration of the kingdom was in all essential features autonomic and distinct from that of the Russian empire, a privilege which Finland still enjoys at this day. A minister for Polish affairs had a place in the St. Petersburg cabinet, and through his hands passed all the public business which the conquered country transacted with the imperial government and the sovereign himself. At Warsaw sat an administrative council, a kind of Polish ministry, over whose deliberations the viceroy presided in person. The members of the Warsaw administration were also the chiefs of the several public departments, such as that of the interior, of justice, of education, of religion, etc. Within the last four years the management of these departments has, however, been transferred to St. Petersburg, while the viceroy, in spite of his title as the representative of majesty, now only retains a mere nominal authority. Instead of the administrative council, an administrative and even legislative inquisition, which interferes arbitrarily with the different branches of the public service, and completely neutralizes the viceregal influence, has been established. This overshadowing power, the so-called Committee of Organization--named thus because it was originally created to arrange the differences between the landlords and serfs which arose out of the emancipation ukase of 1864--has usurped supreme legislative, judicial, and executive functions, so that without its coöperation the viceroy is absolutely powerless. Under the unassuming title of a corresponding member of the committee, the celebrated Panslavist, Solowjeff, is the real leader of the Russian government at Warsaw, while Count Berg, the viceroy, has become the bearer of an empty dignity, and is only saved from the unpleasant position of a puppet by his rank as a marshal of the empire, and commander-in-chief of the forces in the Warsaw district.

It may well be doubted whether the civilized world has ever seen such military-bureaucratic anarchy as modern Poland now presents. Those who witness this state of things from a distance must find it impossible to form an adequate conception of the semi-barbaric, semi-refined confusion which is its chief characteristic. And yet, all the wrong, all the injustice, all the inconsistency of this administrative chaos, with its long train of social, political, and religious embarrassments and entanglements, is outdone by the interference with a most holy and inalienable right of not only every citizen, but of every human being. That right is the sacred right of education and instruction, with which the Russian government has meddled in a most unwarranted and despotic manner. The moral violence to which it has resorted in this matter outrages every thing that the human race considers peculiarly sacred and dear. All the atrocities committed by heathen tyrants, which history records, appear insignificant by the side of the infamous system, deliberately devised and enforced under a monarch who advocates progress at home, while in the affairs of Poland he is ruled by a terroristic faction that labors with fanatic zeal for the moral dismemberment, emasculation, and degradation of the rising generation of a vigorous, living, Christian people, who have shared for more than ten centuries in the blessings of western culture.

This language may appear too strong, but it is more than justified by the provocation and offence. No other government but the Russian has, within historical times, been known to prohibit, under severe penalties, private instruction in the elementary branches and religion in the national tongue. There is no instance on record of a civilized state whose rulers have devoted all their energies to the suppression and reduction of the number of existing educational establishments, or to the discouragement of attendance at school by raising the cost of tuition, the price of school-books, and by generally resorting to other equally disreputable expedients for the purpose of rendering the means of education inaccessible to an oppressed and impoverished population.[186] It is only in Poland that entire faculties--which contained many foreign professors invited to the country with assurances of permanent positions--have been suddenly ordered to adopt a strange language insufficiently developed for scientific purposes; and no government but the czar's would have dared to make non-compliance with such a preposterous demand a cause for summary dismissal without compensation. In no other land would the public schools have been placed under the control of individuals notoriously incompetent in a scientific, educational, social, and moral point of view for this grave responsibility; men so little superior in intellect and manners to the semi-civilized, non-commissioned officers under them, that they have frequently been known to assail the professors in the presence of their scholars with the foulest abuse, and even with blows. Where else, save in Russia, would public functionaries have overlooked gross breaches of discipline in the students, for the sake of tempting them to disgrace themselves by demonstrations against the land of their birth? Where else, save there, could have originated the monstrous idea of perverting the compositions of school children so that they appeared to reflect the darker sides of the national character; or where else would these juvenile emanations have been published to the world as evidences of the degradation of a whole people? What other Christian and civilized government would have stooped to the incredible infamy of turning the seminaries for the education of the future wives and daughters of the land into schools for coquetry and places for promiscuous intercourse between the sexes, in the hope of thus debauching and demoralizing both the present and the next generation?

Yet all this, and all that a fiendish ingenuity could possibly invent or suggest in the same direction, has actually been done, openly and in the broad light of day, by the Russian government in Poland, more especially since the middle of the present decade. To make this tyranny still more oppressive and hideous, the Polish child is not allowed to be educated in its native tongue, but in one instinctively repulsive to it, difficult to acquire by reason of its peculiar characters, and far less adapted to intellectual uses than the Polish. Not even religious consolation and instruction--though they address themselves to the holiest feelings of our nature--are permitted to reach the oppressed people in any language but the abhorred Russian. A terrorism like this acts with the effects of poisonous dew upon excitable temperaments, and explains how the most exemplary piety and the fiercest thirst for vengeance may dwell side by side in the national heart. To crown, as it were, these wrongs and insults, the Russian authorities have lately forbidden the pupils of the public schools to speak their own language even during the hours allotted for play. The design, of course, is to completely Russianize the young Polish generation. It is for the same reason that the pupils of the public schools are compelled to wear a Russian uniform, and to salute, after the fashion of private soldiers, every military officer whom they may happen to encounter in-doors or out. That no Polish father or mother may easily evade the pernicious effects which such an education as the public schools afford must exert upon their offspring, the refined absolutism of Russia has taken care to discourage by all means in its power the employment of private tutors and attendance at foreign institutions of learning. First, no government appointment, not even the most petty and least remunerative post, can be obtained unless the candidate understands Russian; and, as there is a great dearth of private tutors, who are either natives of Russia or who have mastered its language, a large majority of the Polish children are indirectly compelled to go to the public schools, where the only branch of study thoroughly cultivated is the Russian literature and language. Then every conceivable obstacle has been placed in the way of the employment of private instructors, either natives or foreigners, even by those families who could otherwise afford the expense. Under the reign of Nicholas, foreign professors and teachers were almost banished from the country, and those who had not the official influence necessary to evade the law, were obliged to bring them across the frontier in the disguise of servants after having bribed the police and the custom-house officials. This rule has been made still more stringent of late. No private instructor is allowed to follow his calling until he has first submitted to an examination in the Russian language--the sole test of proficiency and qualification--before a government board expressly instituted for this purpose; and the result is, that hundreds of foreigners have resigned their places and left the country. The surveillance of the police is carried to an extent which can hardly be credited abroad, and their espionage makes any evasion of the interdict difficult, if not impossible. To keep the children of all save the wealthiest parents from being sent abroad for an education, the price of passports has been raised to a figure which virtually amounts to a total prohibition of foreign residence and travel.

These few unvarnished facts may suffice to give the reader a faint conception of the present state of domestic and social life in Poland. The child, bred from infancy in accordance with certain specific national customs and habits, in disposition, speech, thought, sentiment, and expression, moulded in a decidedly Polish, Roman Catholic, West-European form, is, upon its admission to school, forced not merely to reject all it has imbibed with its mother's milk, but to accept the very opposite of what nature and duty have taught it to hold sacred at home. With the Russian school uniform--the badge of degradation and slavery--the Polish boy is expected to put on a manner and speech hostile to his nationality and religion; for upon his doing so depends both his own success in life and the safety of his parents. Must not all piety and loyalty, under such an accursed system, all manhood and morality, be destroyed, and the character of the entire people deteriorate? After ten years or more of this training and preparation, the boy becomes a man. Two roads through life now open before him: he either enters the service of the state, in which case he becomes so thoroughly Russianized that he continues in all essential features to live up to the system of the school, and hardens gradually into a genuine Tschinownik; or he returns home to ripen into a conspirator and plotter. Is it then surprising that such a course of education should have made the number of shipwrecked Catilinian existences so much larger in Poland than in any other land? Is it strange that under such a government the national prosperity, which might otherwise be susceptible of great development, should steadily decline, and be replaced by an augmenting wretchedness?

Did we not know that at any time violent political catastrophes may occur and impart to the current of things a direction different to that which a majority of professional and non-professional politicians anticipate, we might easily predict to what such a state of society must inevitably lead. But irrespective of the possibility, even the probability, of great political complications, which would prevent the coöperation of the three-partite powers hereafter, there lies, despite its weaknesses and faults, a vitality and capacity of resistance in the Polish nationality that spurns unconditionally the supposition of such an extermination as the one attempted by Russia; and this it will be well to consider in every attempt for the reconstruction of the country. When a nation is to disappear and be absorbed by another, this task can only be accomplished when it is fused with a nation physically and mentally its superior. Such is, however, far from being the case in the present instance. The Russian nationality, as its colonization experiments in Lithuania have sufficiently demonstrated, can send only smaller, never larger masses into Poland, and the assimilative capacities of the Polish nationality are, in spite of its political subjection, so preponderating, by reason of a superior culture, that the Russians will much sooner become Poles, than the Poles will become Russians. All the ukases, all the religious and educational tyranny and injustice, all the bayonet rule and oppression of the latter can never bridge the gulf between the two peoples. The Russification of Poland is, and must always remain, a physical and moral impossibility which no Murawieffs, Katkoffs, or Solowieffs, can hope to bring about. An imperfect, hastily-prepared insurrection, commanded by inexperienced leaders, nearly destitute of arms and resources, defied the Russian colossus nearly a year and a half. And even for this tardy victory over a country of five millions of inhabitants, who had been for more than a decade governed by martial law, Russia was chiefly indebted to the passive attitude of the neighboring states; for, had either Austria or Prussia abandoned their neutrality, the insurrection would yet be alive. The alleged right and mission of the czars to govern the Poles are actually and morally as unfounded as they are politically and legally an insult to the age and to the law of civilized nations.

FOOTNOTE:

[186] This barbarous conduct of the Russian government has been once equalled and even surpassed. We allude to the laws by which England, after she had been enlightened by the Reformation, prohibited all education among the Irish people. We wish to call most particular attention to the fact that in both cases distinctively Catholic nations have struggled earnestly for the right of instruction which bitterly anti-Catholic ones have withheld. Yet we are daily told that Catholicity is the great foe, and anti-Catholicity the great fosterer of popular education!--ED. CATH. WORLD.

FRIEDEMANN BACH.

PART FIRST.

On New Year's eve of the year 1736, a brilliant company was assembled in the salons of the Count von Bruhl, lord premier to the Elector of Saxony. The mansion, opposite the castle in Dresden, was illuminated so brightly that the whole street in front was light as day. In a shadow of the castle wall stood a man wrapped in a cloak, gazing up at the windows, behind which could be seen the gay confusion of guests. Presently one--a lady splendidly dressed--came close to one of the windows, opened it, and stepped out upon the balcony. The light gleamed on the jewels in her coronet. She stood but an instant in the air, being called back; the window was closed, and she was lost in the throng.

The solitary watcher outside, with a deeply-drawn sigh, turned to depart. His hand was seized as he did so by a passer-by--a man in the dress of the court pages.

"Good evening!" cried a cheery voice. "How glad I am to find you at last! What were you doing here?"

The other laughed, evading an answer, and, drawing his cloak about him, complained of the cold.

"Come to Seconda's!" cried the page. "You will find plenty of hot punch there."

The two walked on to the celebrated Italian restaurant near the old market. The scene there was as brilliant as at the premier's. A gay company was assembled in the largest room, where the new-comers took seats at the table. As they threw off their hats and cloaks, the page was seen to be a man of about forty years of age, with a face deeply lined with the marks of free living. His eyes were bright and merry, and his mouth was liberal in smiles. His companion was a strikingly handsome man of twenty-five, with a pale and haughty countenance, and a form well proportioned and majestic. His expression was grave, and a satirical curl was in his lip when he spoke; his large, dark eyes were now fiercely flashing, now dreamy and melancholy, and they were often downcast and shaded by long, heavy lashes.

"You are dull to-night, mon ami!" cried the jovial page, whose name was Von Scherbitz. "Banish your gloom; it is no time for it."

"Have patience with me," said the young man in a low tone, and with an attempt at a laugh. "I cannot always keep even with you. I have served but a two years' brotherhood, you know."

"In our club, yes; yet one year has spread your fame in music over all Europe! Friedemann Bach has but one rival in renown--the admirable Sebastian!"

A flush mounted to the young man's brow.

"Call him not a rival!" he exclaimed. "I have to thank my father for all I have ever done; and I feel my own insignificance beside his greatness. I feel, too, how unworthy I am of his love."

"Nonsense!" cried Scherbitz. "Your good father is strict, perhaps; pourquoi? he is old; you are young and impetuous; you have your liberal ideas and your adventures, and keep them from his knowledge, to spare him chagrin. Where is the harm in this?"

Friedemann was leaning his head on his hand, which he passed slowly across his forehead, as if waving away the trouble of discussing the point. The punch was placed before them, and the tankards were filled. The guests at the round table drank, as they did; and others came in; among them military officers, painters, and musicians. As a party of distinguished-looking persons entered, the page rose to greet one of them, calling him "Signor Hasse." The gentleman glanced around the company, but declined a seat at the table, retreating to a distant corner. Here he bade the waiter remove the light from a small table in front of him, and bring him supper by himself.

The page called Friedemann's attention to the solitude and gloom chosen by the famous musician. Yet he was well known to be fond of good company, and was universally respected.

"Is it on account of his wife?" asked young Bach.

"Exactly; the brilliant Faustina Hasse, the admired singer, the idolized of all Dresden. They do not live happily."

"You cannot help seeing," observed Friedemann, "that strength is wanting in his character--it is wanting in his compositions. They have softness and melody; but how little of manly power!"

"Yet he is the favorite composer in the world of fashion."

More guests came in, and the general merriment waxed loud. The glasses were rapidly filled and emptied. The conversation among the younger part of the company was that of jovial revellers, intent on as much amusement as they could obtain out of a gayly-dressed officer of the elector's guard, and a chamberlain he had brought in to serve as a butt for their jokes. Friedemann observed them with haughty gravity, stealing a glance now and then at Signor Hasse in his corner.

The chamberlain was flippant with tales of court scandal, at which there were uproarious bursts of laughter. Presently, half-drunk, he was reciting some verses; and at the close he filled his glass and toasted Signora Hasse.

All were silent as Hasse rose and approached the table.

"Gentlemen," he said with dignity, "I have the honor to wish you all a good evening, and farewell. To-morrow morning I leave Dresden."

"To go whither?" asked Scherbitz.

"To Italy."

The company knew by his tone that he meant not to return. There was a moment's deep silence, and then an officer asked:

"Does the signora go with you?"

"No; she remains in Dresden," replied the composer.

Hasse then turned to Friedemann, and grasped his hand.

"Commend me to your father, Monsieur Bach," he said warmly. "Tell him he shall yet hear something good of Scarlatti's disciple."

There was a faltering in his tone as he spoke these last words, and turning away, he left the room. Friedemann sighed deeply as he looked after him, and pushed away his glass, which Scherbitz had just filled.

The merry company was again convulsed with the sallies of the intoxicated chamberlain; and loud applause, cries of "bravo!" and toast after toast urged him on. When he fell back, helplessly drunk, the young men pulled off his court dress, put on a dark one, carried him out, and gave him to the watch as a drunken vagabond to be taken to the guard-house. Then they laughed to think of his consternation at finding himself in the cold cell, on New Year's morning.

Midnight struck in the midst of this boisterous revelry; the last hour of the dying year. There was a wild storm without, and clamorous shouting and singing within. The revellers reeled homeward; young Bach, the only one whose gait was steady, though he had drunk as deeply and as madly as the rest.

When he rose on the following morning, he saw a letter on his table, in a well-known hand, which he quietly opened and read with deep emotion. Then he began to pace up and down the room, till the door was abruptly opened and Scherbitz came in, wishing him the compliments of the season. He read the letter Friedemann handed him in silence.

"A charming old gentleman is that good papa of yours," he said as he gave it back. "His heart is full of kindness. May his life be long and happy! But look not so woe-begone, mon ami! How is it possible for you to satisfy the claims of such exalted, old-fashioned virtue? The time will come when we, madcaps as we are, shall be pointed out as models of propriety for our juniors. Let the wheel of time roll on."

"To crush us in the dust!" moaned Friedemann.

"Look at me--a page forty years old! I have no fear of reverse as long as I serve my lord faithfully. I might have stood up heroically against the all-powerful minister, and I should have been hailed as one of her deliverers by my country; but I kept my place and pension, and remain a page in comfortable quarters."

"You are not the first whose life is a failure."

"Nor shall I be the last. Why should I despair? Come, be reasonable, mon ami! you are too self-condemnatory. Have you forgotten Handel, whom you welcomed here three years since?"

"How could I forget him?"

"Yet Handel is unlike your father. His fantasy is more powerful, his force more developed; he soars like an eagle, while Sebastian Bach sails over the calm waters like a majestic swan. Bach's activity is calm, silent--the offspring of concentrated thought. Handel reaches his aim amid storm and tumult--through strife to victory. Can you blame him for the difference? His path is your own. En avant, mon ami!"

"Handel has had, indeed, a restless and stormy life," replied Friedemann; "but he has never lost himself."

"Had he been born in the present century, instead of the last, his views might have been more liberal. Before he was of your age, he did as others do. Faustina Hasse could tell you some wild tales--"

"He never played the hypocrite to his father!" said Friedemann bitterly.

"It was not worth while. Now, my good fellow, do not flatter yourself you can deceive a page forty years old. Your so-called profligacy and keen self-reproach have another cause than that you choose to assign. You dread the unmasking of what you term your hypocrisy less than the discovery of another secret!"

Friedemann started to his feet, and his face glowed like fire. The page laughed.

"You must govern your eyes better, mon ami, if you want to keep your secret when you hear the name of 'Natalie.' I did not need to witness your behavior last night opposite the minister's palace, to show me the truth!"

Friedemann was now pale as death. With a violent effort he mastered his feelings, and said,

"You will be silent, will you not?"

"As the grave--assuredly! Only be cautious before others. No more! I am going to the guard-house to release the victim chamberlain. Now go to church, and afterward come to Seconda's to breakfast. Au revoir!" And Scherbitz went out.

Friedemann Bach had been organist of the church of St. Sophia since the elector, at the solicitation of his father that he would befriend his boy, had given him the appointment. He hurried to his post, and splendidly performed his part in the imposing service. As the last tones of the organ died along the vast arches, he arose, closed the instrument, and descended from the choir. At the door a pair of vigorous arms were flung around him, and, with a joyful cry, he embraced his father.

The old man pronounced a solemn blessing as he pressed his son to his heart, and warmly praised his morning's work. He had entered the church alone, to enjoy the music of his dearest pupil, whom he now declared his best.

"To your lodgings now, Master Court-organist!" he cried. "Philip is there, and unpacking. We shall stay a week with you." He took his son's arm, and walked on, talking pleasantly all the time.

Philip Emmanuel Bach had grown a stately youth and a ripe scholar in his art since Friedemann had left the paternal home at Leipzig, three years before. They chatted of the old times, when their mother in her snowy cap and apron smiled on their boyish sport; when they roasted apples on the stove of Dutch tiles, and their young sisters chid them, and the little Christopher laughed at them from his mother's lap. Philip had been lonely at school, and was delighted at these reminiscences. The two sons sympathized with the triumph of the good Sebastian when he told them again of his first summons to Dresden, of the note that had come to him from the Minister von Bruhl, on the part of the Elector Augustus of Saxony and Poland: an invitation to play at the church in Dresden. The rector in Leipzig had opposed the departure of the organist of St. Thomas's school; but the elector's own carriage stood at Bach's door to fetch him, and he saw future good for both his sons. He felt that through them the lovers of Hasse should hear music more sublime than the voluptuous melodies of Italy. Then the reception at Dresden; the entrance of the elector into the choir to greet Bach; his words, "O master! if I might hear you play thus at the hour of my death"--all the scene was lived over by the grateful old man. Philip, then a stripling, remembered how a beautiful lady--the famous Faustina Hasse--had rushed in, and, weeping, had kissed his father's hand; Hasse's greeting too, he remembered; and the elector's bidding to ask any favor at his hands.

These recollections and the conversation were interrupted by the entrance of a servant in a rich livery, who presented a note to Friedemann. The young man blushed as he took the note, which he opened and read hastily.

"I will come," he said to the servant, "at the hour named."

The man withdrew.

Sebastian smiled.

"Our court-organist," he said, "appears to have distinguished acquaintances."

"The livery was the lord premier's," remarked Philip.

"Indeed!" asked Sebastian. "You know his excellency, my son?"

"The note came from his niece, the Countess Natalie," answered Friedemann, in a confusion which he could not conceal.

"And you visit the young countess?"

"She is my pupil in music. She has sent for me to arrange a concert, which she is to give on her aunt's birthday."

"I thought M. Hasse managed all those matters."

"I can't well avoid the commission; and such things help one's reputation," faltered the young man. "As to M. Hasse, he has left Dresden."

"Hasse gone--the excellent Hasse!" exclaimed Sebastian.

The good, pious composer was grieved to hear of his unhappiness. Then, changing the subject, he began innocently to advise his son as to the polished manners necessary in the house of the premier. Friedemann pressed his hand and thanked his unsuspecting monitor.

When the elder Bach asked what he had done lately in music, Friedemann replied that what he had done did not satisfy him. His father put aside his plea that the highest and best could alone avail in art.

"We have not reached that," he said; "yet we can rejoice in the success granted us. There is much that I like in your Fughetten."

From music he passed to other questions; and asked, smiling, how long the court-organist meant to remain unmarried.

"Dear father, I need not be in haste."

"'Early wooed has naught rued.'"

"It is a serious step, father."

"Surely, and not to be taken precipitately; but, dear son, let it not be long. If my first grandchild is a boy, I will teach him music. Ay, marriage is a serious matter! I have toiled hard to give bread to my boys and girls, and brought you all up--have I not?--to be good men and skilful artists. From my great-grandfather, all the Bachs have had musical talent. I was once ambitious, my boy, to write something that might win enduring fame. Now, I have but one wish. It is--that all the Bachs may meet in the kingdom of heaven, and join in singing to the glory of God, among the hallelujahs of the angels! Friedemann, child of my heart, let me not miss you there!"

With a sob of anguish, Friedemann sank at his father's feet. Sebastian laid both hands on his head, saying devoutly,

"God's peace be with you, my son, now and for ever!"

Unable to control his agitation--which his pious father thought a burst of filial emotion--Friedemann left the room. Closing the door softly, he rushed through the hall, out of the house, and through the streets to the open country, where he flung himself on the frozen earth and wept aloud.

At dinner the father conversed with his two sons, and much was said of the splendors of the Polish-Saxon court under the administration of the luxurious and prodigal Count von Bruhl. It was then time for Friedemann to go to the minister's palace. He changed his dress and hastened there.

As he passed into the hall, the door of one of the side-rooms opened, and the premier came out. He was a small man, with marked and expressive features, and keen, clear blue eyes. He was sumptuously dressed, and wore a star on his breast. Friedemann stopped and bowed to him.

"Good day, M. Bach, and a happy new year!" said the minister in bland, soft tones. "My niece has sent for you. I am pleased with your promptness. I am grateful for your readiness to meet our wishes at all times, and shall remember it. The countess expects you!"

He nodded, smiled graciously, and walked lightly out of the front door, entering his carriage, which presently drove away.

Friedemann looked after him apprehensively.

"What does this mean?" he murmured. "The smile of that man ever bodes disaster. Let it be so! What can make me more miserable than I am?"

Crossing the hall, he passed on through one of the galleries.

A female servant stood at the door of the ante-room of the countess's cabinet. She opened the door of the inner room, and Bach entered.

A young girl of about twenty, in a costume coquettishly pretty, reclined on a sofa. Her form and her face were both beautiful; a nose slightly aquiline, and well-defined eye-brows, gave her features a character of pride and decision, contradicted by the soft tenderness of the full, rosy lips, and the languishing, violet eyes, shaded by their long lashes. Her hair floated in golden curls over her neck. A faint rose-tint came to her pale cheeks as she rose to receive Friedemann.

The young man stood still, and did not raise his eyes. The countess came nearer, laid her little white hand on his shoulder, and said, almost tenderly,

"What were you doing, Bach, opposite our house last night?"

One glance Friedemann darted from his flashing eyes into her own, but made no other answer.

"I saw you plainly," said Natalie, "as I stepped out on the balcony. You were leaning against the castle wall. Were you waiting for any one? Tell me."

The young man shivered with the violent emotion that shook his whole frame. After a pause, he said with forced calmness,

"You sent for me, most gracious countess, to honor me with your commands respecting the arrangement of a concert."

The countess turned angrily away.

"These are my thanks, proud man, for my trust, for my love. Out upon ingratitude!" she cried.

The young man flushed crimson at these reproachful words.

"What can I say?" he answered in a deep, hoarse voice, full of the wild agony he was vainly striving to repress. "Look at me, and enjoy your triumph! You have made me wretched. Leave me the only consolation that remains--the conviction that I suffer alone!"

"Friedemann," said the countess, shocked to see him thus, "compose yourself, I entreat you! Spare me!"

"I will not spare you!" burst forth Friedemann, unable longer to master his agitation. "You have torn open my bleeding heart-wounds in cruel sport! I will not spare you! I have bought the right to speak with my happiness here and hereafter. I gave you all, Natalie--truth for falsehood, pure, faithful love for frivolous, heartless mockery!"

"I did not mock you!" cried Natalie.

"Did you love me, then?"

"I can not answer that."

"Tell me, Natalie--did you love me?"

"What good can it do? Are we not parted for ever?"

"No; by my soul, no! Nothing shall part us if you love me! But, I must be convinced of that. If you have not--if you do not--I ask you, why did you tempt the free-hearted youth, who lived but for his art, with encouraging looks and flattering words?"

"Be silent!" cried the girl.

Friedemann's burst of grief was convulsive, and he covered his face with his hands.

At length Natalie said,

"I honored your genius--your heart--"

"You loved me not then, and you do not love me now. If you love me, how can you bear to think of becoming the wife of another?"

"Alas! you know; my station, the will of my uncle--"

"My happiness, my peace is nothing to you?"

"My affection is still yours. I shall never love another. Will not that content you?"

Friedemann's pale face crimsoned; he stamped his foot fiercely.

"Hypocrite! liar! coward that I am," he cried; "and all for a coquette!"

Natalie protested against his injustice. She reminded him of her history: her noble birth and orphaned condition; the state and splendor with which her uncle had surrounded her; her scorn of mere pomp and luxury; her isolation in the midst of flatterers and smiling fools; her discernment of the manhood in him--her lover.

"Then be my wife, Natalie!"

She shook her head.

"You will not? You will marry the creature of your uncle, whom you regard with aversion?"

"You know, Friedemann, I do not take this step from interest, but a sense of duty."

"Duty! Toward whom?"

"Yourself! I could never be happy, nor make you happy, as your wife. You are a great artist; but you can never rise to my sphere. And should I sacrifice all for you, would not my incensed uncle pursue us with his vengeance? If we found shelter in solitude, how long would you or I bear this concealment?"

Friedemann grew pale, and looked down.

"We could not be happy," resumed the countess. "All I can do is to keep my heart for you. You can live for your art and me."

"And love you in secret?" asked the young man bitterly.

"I would bear condemnation for your sake."

"You shall not! The woman for whose sake I am miserable, for whom I have deceived father, brother, friends, shall never know the world's scorn. Farewell, Natalie! We never meet again. Be unlike your future husband--be noble and true. Crushed as I am, you shall yet esteem me, knowing that all virtuous resolution has not left my heart!"

"O Friedemann! how I honor and admire you," exclaimed the weeping girl, as she flung her arms around his neck.

The maid entered quickly, announcing the minister.

Natalie retreated to the sofa.

"Ha! M. Bach," said the count, as he came in. "I am delighted to see you again."

"Is it all arranged about the concert, my dear niece?"

"I hope so, uncle," answered Natalie.

"Charming, charming! Madame von Bruhl will be enchanted, M. Bach. You will certainly arrange all for the best. Come very often to visit us; very often. I assure you, my highest esteem is yours."

Friedemann, somewhat bewildered, bowed his thanks, and took leave. The minister looked after him, while he took a pinch from his jewelled snuff-box.

"He has great, very great talent," he said musingly; and added other praises. Then he chatted a little on other subjects, and, looking at his watch, touched the white forehead of his niece with his lips, suffered her to kiss his hand, and retired from the room.

Friedemann left the house with confused thoughts. Suddenly M. Scherbitz ran round the corner, and seized his hand.

"I am going home," said young Bach.

"You are not! Come instantly with me to Faustina Hasse's."

"Are you mad?"

"Not so near it as yourself, mon ami! The blind bird will not see the trap."

"What do you mean?"

"Sacré bleu! Come to Faustina's with me, or you are to-night on the road to Königstein. The lord minister knows all!"

* * * * *

All that afternoon Sebastian had spent in reading the latest exercises and compositions of his son Friedemann, handing sheet after sheet, when he had read it, to Philip. They called for lights as dusk came on. At length Sebastian asked his younger son what he thought of his brother.

Philip knew not what to answer.

"I admire Friedemann," he said. "His works move me. I seem at times to be reading your music, father; then comes something strange and different. I feel disturbed--I can not tell why. I like these compositions; but they give me not untroubled pleasure."

"You are right, Philip," said Sebastian, with a grave and thoughtful smile. "His works have something in them strange and paradoxical. I find this in his sketches more than in his elaborate compositions. But I am not disturbed thereby: I rejoice."

Philip looked surprised.

"Your own light, glad spirit, Philip, accords not with the earnest, oft gloomy character of Friedemann's works. He is not yet settled. There is something great in him, hardly yet developed; the form of expression is not defined. Friedemann seeks a new path to the goal. Every strong spirit has done so. Art ever advances, and her temple is not yet finished. The perfect dwells not on earth."

Philip suggested that his brother's imagination, supplying nobler images than his industry had produced, still soared beyond the reach of practical achievement, and thus left him unsatisfied.

There was a loud knock at the door; two men entered, asked for the court-organist, and, hearing that he was expected every moment, sat down to wait for him. Sebastian tried to enter into conversation with them; but their gruff monosyllables repelled him, and an awkward silence ensued. In about fifteen minutes the door was opened unceremoniously, and M. von Scherbitz entered. He saluted the elder Bach and looked keenly at the two strangers. He then announced his name to the astonished Sebastian, and said he was Friedemann's friend.

"He will soon return," said the father; "these gentlemen, also his friends, are waiting for him."

"Friends!" echoed the page; and placing himself in front of the two men, he gazed at them searchingly. After a while he said,

"Messieurs, his excellency has lost no time in sending you, I perceive; but you are too late. Give the lord minister the compliments of the page, M. von Scherbitz, and tell him he will find the court-organist, M. Bach, at the house of Signora Hasse. I have just had the honor of leaving him there. He will see the elector."

The two men started up without speaking, and hastily left the room. The page threw himself into a chair and laughed long and loudly. The father and son stood in blank surprise, not knowing what to make of the scene.

At last Scherbitz recovered his composure. He addressed Sebastian, and said he had something to communicate to him in private.

"But where is Friedemann?" asked both father and son.

"As I said, at the house of Signora Hasse."

"What does he there?" asked the father.

"That is what I came to tell you."

Philip was sent out of the room. Sebastian seated himself, and with dignity inquired what the gentleman who called himself Friedemann's friend had to communicate.

"I am his friend," replied the page, "and have proved it not for the first time to-day."

"And those two strangers--"

"Were officers sent to arrest him."

The page went on to tell his story, the bold levity of his manner somewhat subdued before the dignity of the excellent old man, who sat with his clear, searching eyes fastened upon him. He began with a preamble about the strict manner in which Sebastian had brought up his sons, and the difference between Friedemann and his brothers. "You are too innocent of knowing the world," he continued, "to be able to shield him against all the dangers that beset the path of youth. Till he came to Dresden, your son knew nothing of life beyond the paternal dwelling and the church of St. Thomas. He has been received here as the son of an illustrious artist; he has won a proud distinction for himself. Can you wonder that applause and flattery have turned his head a little? He might have got over that; but, as ill-luck would have it, the Countess Von Bruhl employed him as her music-master. He fell in love with her."

"Is the boy mad?" exclaimed Bach, rising from his chair.

"Friedemann's first thought afterward was of his father. His union with the girl he loved was impossible; equally so his voluntary separation from her society. Her uncle bade her receive a rich and noble suitor. Compelled to give up hope, the victim of the wildest remorse and anguish, Friedemann fled to dissipation for relief. I strove in vain to help him; but his grief was too new, too fierce and consuming; I looked to time only for the cure. In wild company only could he find diversion from maddening thoughts, and I feared the worst if that resource were denied him. Now he has taken a prudent step. He has broken off his acquaintance with the countess."

"Heaven be praised!" cried the father clasping his hands.

"But her uncle, the minister, had discovered their intimacy. He has sworn the destruction of your son. I have been fortunate enough to baffle him. But Friedemann must instantly leave Dresden."

"He shall!" cried Sebastian. "My poor son needs comfort; he can find it only at home."

"Then he may come to you?"

"Could a father repel his unhappy child? I know, alas! his fiery soul, his need of sympathy. Bring him to his loving father's arms."

Scherbitz caught the old man's hand and warmly pressed it.

"Friedemann is saved!" he exclaimed.

He left the room and the house, promising soon to return. Sebastian sat long in a mournful reverie. Then seating himself at the piano, he played a soft prelude, and sang a beautiful melody by Paul Gerhard. The music swelled into majestic harmony, and many a passer-by in the street stopped to listen, drinking in peace and consolation from the heavenly sounds.

* * * * *

Faustina Hasse, the most beautiful woman in Dresden, and the greatest dramatic singer not only of her own, but perhaps of all times, was reclining on a sofa in a luxuriously-furnished room in her palace. Flowers stood on a table beside her, and several costly trifles were thrown about; but she was simply dressed in white muslin, with a necklace and bracelets of pearls. Her little foot in its satin slipper beat impatiently the footstool on which it rested; there was a tint of painful excitement on her cheek; and a touch of melancholy about her mouth softened the pride that usually masked her lovely features.

A waiting-maid had just presented the card of a visitor on a silver plate.

"I will see him," was the careless answer.

The maid retired and ushered in the Count von Bruhl, who made a low and courtly obeisance. The signora bent her head slightly, and motioned the count to a seat.

"You are surprised at a visit so late in the evening, signora?" the minister asked gently, after an embarrassed silence.

"I do not know its object," was her calm reply.

"Easily explained," with a bland smile. "I am known for a fond husband; in a fortnight I shall give a fête for my wife's birthday. It will surpass all other fêtes in splendor, if the Signora Hasse will favor it with her presence. May I hope that she will do so?"

"I do not sing, my lord minister."

"The signora has misunderstood my humble petition. Even the elector, whose admiration of the signora's genius is well known, would not venture to solicit such a favor."

"Will his highness be there?"

"He promised to honor me."

"I will come."

"Signora, my gratitude is unbounded!" He raised her hand to his lips, and retired with a low bow.

Faustina sprang to her feet, her eyes flashing fire.

"Stop, monsieur!" she cried.

The minister stood still.

"Where is Friedemann Bach?" demanded the lady.

The minister started visibly, but suppressed all sign of emotion. With a courtly smile he endeavored to evade reply.

"Where is Friedemann Bach?" still more angrily asked Faustina.

Something in her face warned the count not to trifle with her.

"He is probably on his way to Königstein," answered the premier.

"For what offence?" asked the lady with a smile of scorn.

"Oh! he needs discipline. The whole parish is disgusted at the scandalous life led by their court-organist. He edifies the devotional with his organ-playing on Sunday morning; but joins his fellow-rioters in the wildest orgies at Seconda's, on Sunday night."

"What have you done with his fellow-rioters?"

"They belong to high families," answered the count with a significant shrug.

"And pass uncensured. Very fair, my lord minister! But you are mistaken. Bach is not on the road to Königstein. He has just had an interview with his highness, here, in my house. I am known to have some influence with the elector; and have used it."

"What have you done, signora?" exclaimed the minister, shocked into a real expression of his feelings.

"Silence!" said Faustina haughtily. "His highness knows all; knows why you have persecuted the unhappy youth, why you would bring misery on the whole family--such a family! Heartless courtier! What can you know of the worth of such a man? Friedemann leaves Dresden; but you must provide him with another place, and one worthy of his genius. The elector wills it so."

She passed out of the room. The count walked to the window, looked out into the dark night, and drummed on the pane in some embarrassment. There was a storm in his breast, but it was necessary to suppress all agitation. Presently he turned around, and saw Friedemann Bach and the page, Von Scherbitz, standing in the room. The minister walked toward them, and said in a gentle tone,

"Monsieur Bach, I am concerned that you must leave us; but it is necessary. You will go as soon as possible to Merseburg. The place of organist in that cathedral is vacant, and I have appointed you to it. I wish you a pleasant journey."

And with a bow he retired.

"Bravissimo, mon comte!" cried the page, laughing heartily. "Roscius was a bungling actor to him. Come now, mon ami," turning to Friedemann--"to your father. He knows all."

Friedemann followed him out with a look of despair. It was a clear, starry winter night. As they came to Bach's house, they heard the hymn Sebastian was singing. As they entered the room, he rose and bade his son welcome.

"Can you forgive me, father?" murmured Friedemann gloomily.

"I have forgiven you; for I trust in your ability to amend."

"No word of reproach?"

"Your conscience does that; my part is to comfort you. Come home to Leipzig."

"No," said Friedemann resolutely; "I will not go home till I am again worthy to be received there."

"Are you so resolved?"

"My life henceforward shall show that I am true to you, father. I will strive to overcome the anguish and remorse that have wrecked me. If I succeed, all will be well. If I fail in the struggle--"

"Then come to my heart, Friedemann!"

"I will."

The son threw himself into his father's arms.

The next morning Sebastian and Philip returned to Leipzig, while Friedemann set out on his journey to Merseburg.

PART SECOND.

Madam Anna Bach, the wife of Sebastian, was at home in Leipzig with her daughters and her youngest son, Christian, waiting for the father to join them after he had dismissed his pupils for the day. Thirteen years had elapsed since the occurrences related.

Johann Sebastian Bach came in presently. He was still a stately and handsome man, bright-eyed, and steady in his carriage; but the once smooth forehead was furrowed with care; his cheeks had fallen in, and their livid hue betrayed internal disease.

He held out his hand to his wife, as he placed himself in his arm-chair.

"You seem exhausted to-day," Madame Bach remarked. "I am glad the lessons are over."

Sebastian smiled.

"I have strength left," he said, "to make good scholars; and so long as I can work, none shall find me remiss. You look so pleased; what have you there?"

"A letter for you, from Philip."

"Ho! ho!" cried Sebastian joyfully; "has the scapegrace at last found time to write to his old father? I have sometimes thought he has forgotten how to write since he has been concert-master in the service of his Majesty of Prussia! Well, what says he?" And he opened and read the letter.

It was a dutiful but rather stiff epistle from a young man unused to literary composition. He described life in Berlin, and the concerts given at court two or three times a week, with the private musical entertainments the king had in his cabinet, where Philip Emmanuel accompanied on the piano his majesty's performance on the flute. The king, he wrote, played the flute surprisingly; but was capricious as to time, following the notes less than his own will and pleasure.

"He always," the letter concluded, "inquires after my esteemed father; and often says, 'Will not your papa come once more to Berlin?' I can promise that if my dear and esteemed father will visit us, he will be received with joy and honors by all. Be pleased to pardon my hasty writing; convey my best love and duty to my most honored mother, my beloved brothers and sisters, and make me happy with a speedy answer.

"Your dutiful son,

"PHILIP EMMANUEL BACH."

As Sebastian refolded the letter, his wife asked what he thought of another visit to Berlin.

"It would do me good," said Sebastian. "I would gladly see the king once more. Twice in my life have I believed there was something good in me: the first time was in the year 1717, when my contest was appointed with M. Marchand, and he took himself quietly off the evening before it; the second time was three years ago, when the great King of Prussia came into the antechamber to welcome me, and when some rude chamberlains laughed at my expressions of duty and homage, his majesty chid them with, 'Messieurs, voyez vous, c'est le vieux Bach.' That pleased Friedemann so much!"

"Then you will go to Berlin?"

"If I can get leave of absence, and if I find a small overplus of money in the purse. Strange, that in my old days I should be seized with a roving propensity! I had nothing of it in youth. Well, let us go in to dinner."

It was near the close of day, and Sebastian sat outside the door of his dwelling, surrounded by his family, under the stately lindens that shaded the avenue leading to the old Thomas's school. The mother and her daughters were occupied in needlework and knitting; the younger sons were listening to their father's anecdotes of the old organist, Reinecken, his instructor in Hamburg. The setting sun shone on a lovely picture.

Caroline, who had her eyes turned toward the corner of Cloister street and Thomas's churchyard, suddenly uttered a cry of joy, and sprang to her feet.

The others rose and asked what was the matter; the venerable father alone kept his seat. A tall figure was seen crossing the churchyard; and now Sebastian rose, for he recognized his son Friedemann.

"Father," cried Friedemann, "I have come to stay with you!"

The father stretched out his arms and warmly embraced his son. The others crowded round him, bidding him a joyous welcome. Nearly an hour passed in the delightful confusion of such a reunion.

Later in the evening, Sebastian was alone with his son, and asked what had brought him home so suddenly.

Friedemann had overmastered the sorrow that had crushed his spirit thirteen years before. But a thousand difficulties were in his way, and the struggle preyed on his mind. He began to despair of ever doing any thing truly great in art. He had wished to strike out a new path; the motive of his efforts was pure, and he did not design to neglect the excellent old school.

"But I have been slandered, insulted!" he exclaimed bitterly. "My aim has been ridiculed, my endeavors have been maliciously criticised, my merits decried."

"By whom, Friedemann?"

Friedemann colored as he answered, "I know I am wrong to be disturbed by the malignity of a shallow fool; but I cannot help it. There is a critic in Halle, one schoolmaster Kniffe, who passes for a luminary in the musical horizon, and writes reviews."

"I have seen them; they are absurd," said Sebastian. "He must cause some sport in Halle."

"On the contrary, he is dreaded on account of his malice; and his base libels please the ill-natured and envious."

"And know you not," asked his father, "that only the base and evil array themselves against the good? Is there a more certain proof of elevated worth than the impotent rage and opposition of the vicious? I never taught you to look with pride or arrogance on your equals or inferiors; but to be calm and self-possessed, and to maintain your ground in reliance on Him to whom alone you are accountable. Do that, Friedemann, and no stupid or malicious critic can make you dissatisfied with yourself."

Here Caroline came in, announcing that a stranger wished to speak with her father.

"He would not," she said, "give his name."

Sebastian bade her bring him in. Presently a sharp voice called out,

"Bon soir, mon cher papa!" and the stranger entered and took the old man's hand. "Do you not know me?"

Friedemann recognized him, and saluted Monsieur von Scherbitz.

"Ha! our ex-court-organist. The same ill-boding frown between the brows as in 1737! You are little changed in thirteen years. And I, at fifty-three, am grown to be a first lieutenant."

"You proved a friend to my son in his danger," said Sebastian, "and are therefore welcome to me and mine. To what lucky chance am I indebted for this visit to my quiet home?"

"To the most unlucky, my dear sir! I was so careless, at the prime minister's last court, as to tread on the left fore paw of his lady consort's lapdog. The beast cried out; the countess demanded satisfaction; and in punishment for my misdeed I am marched as first lieutenant to Poland in the body-guard of his excellency."

Sebastian felt a horror creep over him at the sarcastic, misanthropic wit of his visitor, and sought to change the conversation. But Scherbitz went on jesting in his bitter way about his tragical destiny, concluding with the information that he had come over to Leipzig simply to see Papa Bach once more in his life; for, on the word of a first lieutenant, he had loved and honored him since the first time he had seen him thirteen years ago.

The next morning Scherbitz walked in the little garden behind Thomas's school, bounded by its high wall. He saw Caroline fastening a vine to an espalier, and came to assist her. In a conversation with her, he learned that none of the daughters of Bach had any talent for music. The charming singing he had heard early in the morning was by Madam Bach. But Caroline had a poetic taste, and was Friedemann's favorite sister.

In talking with Friedemann, his friend could not fail to discover the morbid state of his mind. Scherbitz thought it came from thinking too deeply.

"Not the will," he said, "but action removes mountains. We are but philosophers, and the slaves of circumstances. Had not the minister played the spy on you and his pretty niece, had not I stepped on the lapdog's foot, we might both have been at this moment sitting quietly in Dresden; you beside Natalie, witching the world with music; I as a merry page of fifty-three, jesting and enduring."

"Do you know," said Friedemann, and as he spoke his countenance altered strangely, "I have often prayed that I might be mad, for a time--not for ever!" In a quick, vehement tone, "Oh! no--no--not for ever; but mad enough to forget. And yet, the memory of what I have suffered would even then cling to me!"

He pressed his hands with a wild gesture over his eyes.

"You must not talk so wildly," said the lieutenant soothingly. "You are yet young, and can accomplish much."

"What can I do?" cried Friedemann with harrowing laughter. "Nothing, nothing! At eight and thirty all is dead with me; I am older than you! Ha! mark you not where madness lurks yonder behind the door, making ready to spring upon my neck as I go out? He dares not seize on me when my father is near; he shrinks up till he is little, and hides himself in a spider's web over the window. But he shall not get hold of me! Ha, ha, ha! I am cunning. I will not leave the chamber without my father. Look you, old page, I understand a feint as well as you!"

"Mon ami! mon ami! what is the matter?" cried the lieutenant, and, seizing his friend by the shoulders, he shook him violently. "Friedemann Bach! do you not hear me?"

Friedemann stared at him vacantly. At length his face lost its unnatural expression; his eyes became like living eyes, and he asked softly what M. von Scherbitz wanted.

"What makes you such an idiot, man? Recollect yourself!" cried Scherbitz.

Friedemann gave a forced laugh.

"You take a jest deeply," he said. "And you really believe that I am sometimes mad? Not yet, friend! I am more rational than ever."

"Well, mon ami, it was your jest; but one should not paint the devil on the wall. Sit down, and play me something till I get over my fright. You acted your part so naturally!"

Friedemann sat down to the instrument and began to play.

"I did not dream of this," muttered the lieutenant; while Friedemann, after playing half an hour, suddenly let his hands drop, sank back, and fell fast asleep.

* * * * *

On the morning of the 21st of July, 1750, the church-bells were ringing a solemn yet cheerful peal, inviting the pious to the house of God. The sun shone brightly; the old man's heart was renewed in love and devotion, and even Friedemann's gloomy breast was penetrated with the beam of comfort, joy, and love. He had spent a part of the night in studying a masterpiece of his father's, the great Passion music. Full of the grandeur of the work, his face animated, he was walking to and fro in his father's chamber, pondering a similar work which he thought of undertaking.

Sebastian sat in his arm-chair, with folded arms, dressed ready for church. He followed with his eyes, smiling affectionately, the movements of his son. After a while, he said,

"I am glad the Passion music pleases you so well. I have a work of quite another kind, finished, the first idea of which I got from your Fughetten. And you are the first, after me, that shall see it."

He went to his desk, opened it, took out a sealed packet, and gave it to his son. It was inscribed, "To my son Friedemann."

"I meant it for you, in case of my death before I saw you," said the old man. "You may break the seal."

Friedemann opened the packet. It contained that nobly conceived, admirably executed work which from the day of its appearance has commanded the reverent admiration of all the initiated--The Art of Fugues, by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Friedemann looked over the manuscript with sparkling eyes.

"And my poor attempt," he cried, "has suggested a work destined to immortalize its author! I have not lived in vain. O my father! thanks. You have made me a noble present."

"You have rewarded me, Friedemann."

Sebastian went on to pour into his son's heart the kindly words of wisdom.

"While you labor to deserve the appreciation of your equals," he said, "strive to instruct those who cannot thus repay you. It is for man only to show to the best that he belongs to the best. Let your light shine--else you lower yourself, and rebel against your Master."

The chime of the bells, that had ceased, now recommenced; and Madam Bach came in with her daughters, young Christian, and the lieutenant. All were ready for church. Madam Bach gave her husband his prayer-book and a bunch of flowers; Caroline brought his hat.

Sebastian rose, gave his arm to his wife, and walked to the door. Turning back an instant, he glanced at the window shaded with vine-leaves glistening in the sunlight, and said,

"What a lovely morning!"

As he went out of the room, he stopped suddenly, and let fall the flowers and the prayer-book. The women screamed with fright. The old man struggled for a few moments, then sank back lifeless into the arms of his son.

Thus died Johann Sebastian Bach, by a stroke of apoplexy.

* * * * *

Three years had passed. The wealthy Baron von Globig celebrated the feast of the vintage at his magnificent villa not far from Dresden. Gilded gondolas, with long and many-colored pennants, were gliding to and fro over the bosom of the Elbe, landing the distinguished guests. The profuse splendor that marked all the preparations was worthy of the favorite of the Count von Bruhl. Nothing the most fastidious taste could suggest was wanting.

Few in the aristocratic company seemed to notice the host; but his lovely wife was the observed of all. She was dignified and courteous, but appeared to take little interest in any thing.

As twilight came on, colored lamps were lighted in the gardens, and gorgeous illuminations were displayed. Bands of musicians played alternately; stately men and beautiful women moved in the merry dance, and general hilarity prevailed.

When the company returned to the great drawing-room, the Prussian ambassador presented to the lady of the house a distinguished-looking man as Philip Emmanuel, the second son of the great Sebastian Bach.

The baroness colored, and gave a furtive glance around her. After a few words of conversation, she asked Bach, in a careless tone, where was his elder brother.

"We do not know," answered Philip sadly. "None of us has seen Friedemann since the day of our father's death, when he suddenly quitted Leipzig."

"Have you heard nothing of him?"

"Nothing--except that he had been at times before subject to fits of melancholy, which threatened his reason. We fear the worst."

The baroness turned away in silence. The baron came up, and presented a petition for a little piece of music from the celebrated Monsieur Bach.

"We are to have some variety," he added; "a bit of fun, by way of enhancing the effect of your divine playing. A poor, half-crazy musician from the Prague choir, who plays dances in the villages, will be permitted to give us a tune in the antechamber. The doors may be opened; but he must not come into the light, for his dress is shabby and disordered."

The music sounded from the ante-room. A servant threw open the doors, and in the imperfect light the guests saw a meanly-dressed man sitting at the piano, his back toward them. They had expected a joke; the baron having told many of them what a surprise he had in store. But when they heard the playing--the wonderful, entrancing melody, now towering into passion, now sinking to a harmonious plaint, which the poor, unknown musician drew from the instrument--all were deeply touched. The baroness and Philip stood, pale as death, looking inquiringly yet doubtingly upon each other. At a bold turn in the music, the baroness leaned toward him, whispering,

"'Tis he!" and Philip exclaimed aloud,

"It is my brother--Friedemann!"

The musician turned, sprang up, and rushed into Philip's arms. At sight of the baroness, he started back with the exclamation--"Natalie!"

The baroness sank back in a swoon. Friedemann tore himself from Philip's arms, forced his way through the crowd, and rushed from the house. The shock had brought on another attack of his awful malady.

* * * * *

An old man, past three score and ten, sat in a room in the upper story of a house in one of the suburbs of Berlin. He was reading a pile of music that lay on the table, making notes on the margin with a pencil. The room was poorly furnished, and lighted by a single lamp that flared in the currents of air, flinging fitful shadows on the wall. The storm raging without shook the loose panes in the window, and twisted the weather-cocks on the roof till they creaked as they swung. The cold had penetrated the chamber, and the fire in the grate was scanty. It was the last night of the year.

But all absorbed sat the old man, and heeded not cold or tempest as he read the music. His form was tall and emaciated; his pale face showed the ravages of age and disease. His thin, white locks fell back from his temples; but his large eyes had the brightness of youthful enthusiasm.

The bell struck midnight. The sounds of festal music, singing, and shouting came from the streets; and faintly on the wind came the swell of the Te Deum chanted in a neighboring church.

The old man looked up from his reading, and listened attentively. There was a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes.

The door opened, and a young man, with a pale and melancholy face, and a form more meagre than the other's, came into the room.

"What hour struck?" asked the old man.

"Midnight. You had better go to bed."

"I do not need sleep. Look, I have been reading this legacy of my father. Ah! if you, poor Theodore, could have had such a father. What year has just begun?"

"Eighty-four."

"Eighty-four! Forty-seven years ago.... We will not speak of that."

"Poor old friend! Will you never tell me who you are?"

"You did not ask me the day I first saw you; when I found a madman just about to take his own life. I pulled away the weapon; I bade you live!"

"You saved my life; but what is it worth? You see me old even in youth."

"You will live many years yet."

"No. I suffer a great deal; I feel that my hours are numbered. But why not tell me your name?"

"He who composed that noble work," said the old man, pointing to the music, "was my father."

"The name was on the first leaf, with the title of the music, and you have torn it out! I do not understand music, you know. Tell me, old friend, what to call you?"

"'The Old Musician.'"

"So the few who know you in this great city always call you. But your other name?"

"I have promised to reveal it only to an artist in music."

Then, noticing the pallid and sunken cheek of his young companion, he said,

"Has the new year brought you nothing, Theodore?"

Theodore took a roll of money from his vest pocket, and threw it on the table.

"Gold!" exclaimed the old man.

"Yes--when we need it no longer!"

He drew out a flask from the pocket of his cloak.

"Wine, too; the best of Johannisberger! You have tasted no wine lately; drink to the new year."

The old man turned away; for bitter recollections came up, associated with the season.

Theodore took two glasses from the buffet, drew up a chair, sat down, and uncorked the flask. He filled the old man's glass and his own with the wine, which diffused a rich fragrance.

The old man asked, at length, how he came by such luck.

"I sold my paintings to a lord travelling through the city."

"What a pity you could not exhibit them!"

"Those sketches cost me seven years of more than labor: all I have thought, lived, suffered; the early dreams of youth; the stern repose after the struggle with fate! I sacrificed all. I spared not even the glimmering spark of life; and thought when the work was finished the laurel would deck my brow in death. All fancies! Wherever I offered my work, I was repulsed. The publishers thought the undertaking too expensive. Some advised me to paint scenes from the Seven Years' War; others called my sketches wild and fantastic."

"Ay, ay!" murmured the old man. "Lessing, who died three years ago, said to me rightly, 'All the artist accomplishes beyond the appreciation of the multitude, brings him neither profit nor honor! The highest must grovel with the worm.'"

"As long as I can remember, old friend, I have had but one passion--for my art. Yet must I degrade art to the rabble; must paint apish faces, while visions of divine loveliness float before me; must feel the genius within me comprehended by none; must be driven to despair of myself! With all my gifts, I must ask myself, at five and twenty, Wherefore have I lived?"

"Live on; the answer will come."

"Has it come to you? Had I gained the prize, I might have been like Raphael; you, like some great master of your art. Success was not for us; and we are doomed to insignificance."

"Silence!" cried the old man; "that leads to madness. I know the horror of madness. They tell me I was a long time so."

"No fear of that, old friend. We are both too near a sure harbor. Come, fill up your glass! Hark to the music and shouting in the streets. Here we sit, like the gods on the summit of Olympus, sipping nectar, and laughing at the fools below us. Drink as I do. No more? Well, yonder is your bed, and here is mine. Good-night to you."

They retired to rest. The storm ceased to beat on the window-panes; but the bell-ringing and music continued throughout the night.

The bright sunshine of morning flooded the chamber. The old man arose and went to the window. It was a clear, cold morning; the air was keen, the sky cloudless; the frost had wrought delicate tracery on the panes.

The old man threw his cloak over his shoulders, and stood some time at the window. Then he went to awaken his young friend.

He touched the hand that lay outside the bed-covering; it was cold and stiff! Poor Theodore had fainted in the struggle with destiny. Long the prey of heart-disease, he had died in the night.

The old man stood as if paralyzed, gazing on the face of his dead friend. His last stay was broken!

Sitting down by the body, he remained motionless the whole day. Late in the afternoon, the woman who kept the house came in with a message to Theodore, and found the old man exhausted and shivering with the cold. She led him into a warm room, and gave him nourishment.

When Theodore was buried, the gold he left was given to the old man, with whom he had lived two years, supplying the wants of both by his scanty earnings as a portrait-painter and the sale of a drawing now and then. Now that he had no resource for the future, the people of the house advised the old man to go to the overseer of the poor-house. He shook his head, saying, "No; I will go to Hamburg."

"To Hamburg!" echoed the housekeeper. "Hamburg is a long way from Berlin; you could not bear such a journey."

But the old man soon forgot his purpose. He resumed his wanderings through the streets of Berlin--his practice before he met with Theodore--stopping to listen whenever he heard music. He would sometimes go into the houses where concerts were given; and all who remembered him were glad to see "the Old Musician" once more.

One evening as he walked about the streets, he stopped to listen to music sounding from the windows of an illuminated palace. He went up the steps and was going in; but the porter, a Swiss, pushed him rudely back. So he stood without in the cold and cutting night wind, and listened, his whole soul absorbed in the music.

A servant in livery came out, and ran against him. "Ha!" he exclaimed in surprise; "is that you, Old Musician? How long it is since I have seen you. Why do you stand there shaking in the cold?"

"Monsieur Swiss would not let me pass," answered the old man.

"Monsieur Swiss is an idiot! Come in with me, old friend; you shall thaw your old limbs, and have some refreshment. My lord gives a grand concert." To the porter he said, "You must always let in the Old Musician; my lord has given orders that it shall be so. He comes to enjoy the music."

He led the old man to a seat near the fire in one of the ante-rooms, and drew a folding screen before him. "You are out of view here," he said; "but you can hear every thing. I will bring you a glass of wine."

All that evening the old man listened to music that thrilled his inmost heart. It was late when the concert ended. Then the man who had brought him in, came and told him it was time to go, offering to send a boy home with him.

"That was admirable music," said the old man drawing a deep breath.

"It was," replied the servant. "All you heard was composed by the same master, who is staying with my lord at present."

"What is his name?"

"It is Master Naumann, chapel-master to the Elector of Saxony."

"Let me speak with him, if he is in the house."

"Certainly, if you want to ask any thing."

"I want to thank him."

"Well, come to-morrow morning."

The next morning the strange visitor was announced to the composer Naumann.

"Who is the Old Musician?" he asked. The man could not tell. He had been known by that name for years in Berlin, and was thought to be partially insane at times. But he was said to have a thorough knowledge of music.

"Bring him in," said Naumann. The old man entered the room. He had a dignity of mien that inspired respect, in spite of his poor apparel; and Naumann rose and advanced to meet him.

"You are welcome, my good friend, though I know not your name--welcome as a lover of our noble art. Take this chair."

The old man, still standing, answered, "I come to thank you, sir, for the pleasure of hearing your concert last evening. I was a listener, privately, and understood that your latest compositions were performed. I will not conceal my name from you. I am Friedemann Bach."

Naumann stood petrified with astonishment. "Friedemann Bach!" at length he repeated; "the great son of the great Sebastian. How strange, indeed! I saw your brother Philip at Hamburg, only last year. The excellent old man mourns you as dead."

"I would be dead to all who knew me in better days," was the melancholy reply. "It would grieve them to know how sad a failure my life has been. Even in Berlin none know that Friedemann Bach yet lives; not even Mendelssohn, the friend of Lessing. While he lived, I had no fear of starving."

Naumann was deeply affected. Philip had told him his brother's history; his sorrows, his disappointments, his terrible suffering for years. "What can I do for you?" he asked mournfully.

"Nothing," answered Bach. "You have done every thing in showing me what I could and should have done. You know how I failed; how my life was wasted; how I fell short in all my bold and burning schemes. I fainted, and did not reap. But you need not the warning of my history. You walk securely and cheerfully in the right path. I can only thank you for your magnificent works. The blessing of God be with you! I feel now that I have nothing more to do in this world."

He turned away, and was gone before Naumann could recover from the emotion his words called forth. He called the servant to ask where he could be found; but no one could tell him. The boy who had escorted the old man home had not been suffered to go to his door. At length he met with Moses Mendelssohn, and told him what had happened.

Mendelssohn was astonished to learn that Friedemann Bach yet lived, and in Berlin. The only clue he had was his knowledge of Lessing's old dwelling, where the old musician lived some time before.

The next morning the two went to the Friedrichstadt, and found Lessing's house. The housekeeper opened the door.

"Does M. Friedemann Bach live here yet?" asked Mendelssohn.

The woman shook her head, lifting the corner of her apron at the same time to wipe her eyes.

"Pardon me," she cried; "but I cannot help it! Just at this time yesterday they carried away my poor friend, the Old Musician. He died three weeks after his young friend, the painter."

Her voice was choked with tears.

There was no need of further inquiry. Poor Bach was a wanderer no more.

ON ST. PETER DELIVERED FROM PRISON.

This is no mystery Or juggler's play Which here is told. What lock can stay Him who the key Of heaven doth hold?

"IT'S WRONG!"

"It's wrong! It's wrong!" the whole day long My hidden censor has piped the song, Till my ears are tingling like a gong With--"It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Out by my chamber window there, In the mulberry-tops, in the August air, The mock-bird sings his devil-may-care-- "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Rash birdy! have you no monishing fear-- Chiding a monarch as you do here? I'm regal in all this little sphere! "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

You laying down law for the village queen, Who from her envied height serene Gives a code to its best, I ween! "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Ha! see, I am decking my "throat of snow" With his costly gems, (he called it so.) What if little Barefoot beg below? "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Look, little sage, in my bright blue eyes! Their color was caught from the summer skies. He says it; and ah! he is very wise. "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Ha! self-wise bird, I am fooling you. My lover is not more gallant than true, And we'll go tripping it through the dew-- "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

What! wrong to go by the shiny birch That shades the lane to the village church? Wrong, may be, to leave you in the lurch? "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

O birdy! I'll be a love-in-the-mist, In my loom-fog veil, when the bride is kissed, Blushing through filmy folds--ah! hist! "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

Well, welladay for the wedding-bells! Arch-misanthrope, what is this he tells As whistle and chime go down the dells? "It's wrong! It's wrong!"

BRITISH PREMIERS IN RELATION TO BRITISH CATHOLICS.

CONCLUDED.

Every step toward emancipation, however halting and feeble, was of great consequence, since it established a precedent--and precedents in England have often the force of law. Thus, the act fifth, George IV., chapter seventy-nine, permitted persons to hold office in the receipt of customs, without taking any oath but that of allegiance. This was a gain, trivial in itself, yet, under the circumstances, not to be despised. The same thing was true of Mr. George Bankes's bill, relieving English Catholics from penalty of double assessment of land-tax. It was introduced and passed in 1828. While recording Canning's services to the cause which Catholics had at heart, we must not forget to show how ready he was, on the other hand, to combine with his colleagues when Ireland had to be oppressed and persecuted. In 1825, they agreed, with one mind, to put down the Irish Catholic Association, because they saw how powerful an instrument it would become, in O'Connell's hands, for the attainment of freedom. The bill by which they suppressed it was called, by the Liberator, "the Algerine Bill." But in the same year an attempt was made, with very doubtful sincerity, to modify the maddening effect of this suppression by conferences with O'Connell, Sheil, and other lay Catholics of influence, by inducing them to assent to a proposal, made by way of compensation, for the pensioning of the Catholic clergy, and the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders.[187] These were to be "the two wings" of a Catholic relief bill, and to this offer O'Connell was induced to adhere. The measure was introduced by Sir Francis Burdett, in April, 1825. It passed the Commons by a considerable majority; and was then, as might have been expected, thrown out by the Lords, who were fortified in their opposition by the Duke of York. Thus the great work of emancipation was again postponed. Though there had been points in Canning's conduct which were displeasing to Catholics; though, with strange inconsistency, he resisted the repeal of the test and corporation acts, which by relieving dissenters would have relieved Catholics also; though he was sharply attacked by Brougham, and charged with pleading their cause without the smallest idea of success, and with betraying those whom he appeared to befriend, yet they listened with delight to his speech in behalf of their claims a few months before his death. They placed their confidence in him, and looked forward to his premiership as the season of their deliverance. But as Pitt had resigned office in consequence of his attachment to the Catholic cause, so it was Canning's fate also to taste the bitter fruits of befriending an oppressed and hated communion. The frowns of royalty, the fury of Tories, and the perfidy of Whigs, combined with the insidious growth of disease to bring him down to the grave harassed and worn.

A recess government followed. Lord Goderich had been a supporter of the Catholic claims; but mediocrity such as his could not be expected to hold its place long at the head of affairs, and still less to conduct a momentous and vital question to a happy issue. That question, like all others of equal magnitude, had to be settled out of parliament before it could be carried within its walls. The monster meetings assembled in Ireland at the call of O'Connell brought the matter to a crisis, and convinced all reasonable men that concession could not long be delayed. Yet the Duke of Wellington, who succeeded Lord Goderich in 1828, and Sir Robert Peel still ranged themselves on the side of the opponents of emancipation. The Lords, in the month of June, rejected a motion pledging them to a favorable consideration of the measure. Vesey Fitzgerald, however, an Irish liberal, was made president of the Board of Trade, and required, according to English law, to be reelected as member of parliament before he could hold his office in the government. It was a glorious opportunity for the Irish, and they embraced it manfully. At the suggestion of Sir David Roos, an Orangeman,[188] and of an intimate friend named Fitzpatrick, O'Connell proposed himself as a candidate for Clare, in opposition to the protégé of the government, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald. In such a conflict the odds were all but desperate; yet O'Connell was victorious, although legally ineligible. He was declared duly returned; and he was the first Catholic elected by an Irish constituency since the reign of James II.

That election was, in effect, the triumph of emancipation. It sunk deep into the minds of the chiefs of the opposition. The greatest statesmen had long been wavering in secret. Lord Liverpool had been convinced some time before his death that the time for yielding the point was drawing nigh, and that he would soon have to support the Catholic claims, if not as a premier, at least as a peer. Sir Robert Peel had, in 1825, requested Lord Liverpool to relieve him of office on the ground that emancipation could no longer be deferred. Three years later, he announced to the Duke of Wellington his resolution to support the claims he had so long resisted, and declared that, in pursuit of that "great object," he was ready to sacrifice "consistency and friendship." Little did the majority, either of his friends or foes, imagine how deep a change his mind had really undergone.

It would hardly be too much to say the same of the duke. He was the only man in England who could carry emancipation, and the only man who did do it. He was that power in the state which the circumstance required. He accomplished in England, though with far different aims and feelings, what the lyre of Thomas Moore effected in Irish homes, and the eloquence of O'Connell on the fields of Tara and Clontarf. The test and corporation act being repealed, his way was cleared. Persons holding office under the crown were no longer obliged to qualify themselves by receiving the Lord's Supper in the Established Church. He began, therefore, by speaking on the Catholic claims with studied ambiguity. Though he declared that his opinions on this subject were as decided as those of any one in the house, he added that he should oppose emancipation until he should see a great change in the question. That change was fast coming over it. He knew that the Commons would then pass no very arbitrary laws; that they would not require candidates for a seat in parliament to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy on the hustings; that without emancipation it would be impossible to disfranchise the forty-shilling freeholders; that others would be elected besides O'Connell; and that they could not be prevented from taking their seats and representing their constituents without a civil war. The duke, though a great general, was not a man of blood. He was not an impracticable man, though a Tory. He knew how to "take occasion by the hand," and to do that of which St. Philip Neri says there is not a finer thing on earth--make a virtue of necessity. He was influenced in the matter by no abstract principle of justice, no enthusiasm in favor of the oppressed, no sympathy with a proscribed faith; but he sincerely loved his country, and he came by degrees to feel convinced that her interests were consulted best by altering the basis of her constitution in church and state. He sought, indeed, securities from those whom he proposed to relieve, and he purchased at their hands the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland; but, on the other hand, he was willing to endow the Catholic Church in the sister isle, and to apply three hundred thousand pounds per annum toward the payment of the priests. To this part of his plan Peel could not be induced to consent, and it was subsequently abandoned. Great as Wellington was in war, he was greater in peace--greater in his victory over Protestant prejudices, and as the champion of the rights of an injured people and a persecuted creed.

On the 5th of March, 1829, Sir Robert Peel (then Mr. Peel) brought forward a bill for the relief of Catholics. It was the bill long desired, clamored for, dreaded; which was to alter fundamentally the character of English law, and change the destinies both of England and Ireland. It was preceded by a bill finally suppressing the Catholic Association, at the very time when that association was being dissolved of its own accord. The mind of Peel had been long and anxiously engaged in the study of the question as regarded Ireland. Night and day he had been examining evidence, pondering the difficulties to be overcome, and the chances of success. It was the nature of his mind to work in secret, and to manifest the result only when it became absolutely necessary. During the period of transition he voted against Catholic emancipation, but did so with manifest repugnance. Whatever decision the house might come to, he said, he should give it his best acquiescence; and if the measure should be carried, he should use his earnest endeavors to reconcile Protestants to it. When it was proposed to admit Catholic lords into the upper house, he offered but slight opposition to the bill, nor did he object to granting English Catholics the same electoral rights as were enjoyed by their brethren in Ireland. His Tory friends were offended by his moderation; for they loved "the falsehood of extremes," and they could not comprehend his anxiety to promote education among the Catholic as well as among the Protestant part of the population. They would not recollect how many indications he had given of a possible change in his future conduct in reference to emancipation. They knew not, or they affected to forget, that two years before Canning died, he had expressed to Lord Liverpool his conviction that emancipation must pass, and had offered to resign. So long ago as 1821, he had declared, in reply to Plunket, that even if his own views prevailed, "their prevalence must be mingled with regret at the disappointment which he knew the success of such opinions must entail upon a great portion of his fellow-subjects." He should, he said, "cordially rejoice if his predictions proved unfounded, and his arguments groundless."

There were those who perceived the current his thoughts were taking, and among them was the Duke of Clarence, afterward William IV. One of the duke's sons told Cardinal Acton that, when he returned home one night from a very late division in the House of Commons, of which he was a member, he went to his father's dressing-room, and was asked by the duke how the division on emancipation had gone; and when he was told that the bill had been lost, the duke said,

"That rascal, Peel, will adopt emancipation, will carry it, and take the glory from us who have fought for it all our lives."[189]

No less remarkable were the words used by the Duke of Clarence when, at last, Wellington and Peel introduced, with all the weight of government recommendation, the great bill for Catholic relief. He wished, he said, that the ministers had been as united in 1825 as they proved in 1829. "It will be forty-six years next month," he added, "since I first sat in this house; and I have never given a vote of which, thank God! I have been ashamed; and never one with so much pleasure as the vote I shall give in favor of Catholic emancipation."

It would be foreign to our purpose in this place to relate the circumstances attending the passing of the bill, and the admission of O'Connell into the House of Commons. We are concerned, not so much with these events, as with the premiers who brought them about. Peel did not acquire the confidence of the Irish whom he had emancipated. O'Connell regarded him with implacable aversion, and nothing could exceed the hatred and distrust with which he was treated by the Tories who had once been his friends. It was nothing to them that the change of his politics had been the result of long and arduous study; that he had taken nothing for granted, but required proof of every statement made by those who sought to convert him to their side. They had not seen what we possess--the posthumous volumes edited by Peel's trustees, Lord Stanhope and Mr. Cardwell--and they could not, therefore, judge of the laborious and conscientious search by which he arrived at his conclusions; and even if they had seen them, it is probable that they would have reproached him for investigating the subject in a hesitating frame of mind, and for beating out for himself and many of his followers a path of apostasy.

Eighteen years passed by before any other measure of importance affecting Catholic interests was laid before the houses of parliament. The influence of emancipation in a liberal direction was felt deeply in the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, which but for that previous act of justice would have been impossible. The Duke of Wellington prepared the way for Lord Grey, just as Grey and his colleagues, by shaking the power of the aristocracy and destroying the rotten boroughs, led in the issue to the more extended reform bill carried by the late Lord Derby, to the extension of the suffrage to all householders and a large proportion of lodgers, and to the passage of the Irish Church bill. During the premierships of Lord Melbourne and of Sir Robert Peel the questions of free-trade and the abolition of the corn-laws absorbed public attention, and the Catholic topic was all but set aside. The paltry grant to Maynooth was made a yearly subject of hot debate, and a few thousands per annum were grudgingly bestowed on an Irish college for the education of priests, while the Protestant establishment in that island continued to be the most richly endowed in the world in proportion to the number of its members. The public mind, however, was attracted and agitated by a spectacle in which parliament was not concerned, and which in all the course of legislation in favor of Catholics had never been contemplated. This was the extraordinary progress of Catholic ideas, doctrines, and practices in the University of Oxford, and among the clergy of the establishment. The excitement which this produced had reached its height when, in February, 1847, a bill intended to supplement the emancipation of 1829 was introduced by Mr. Watson, Lord John Manners, and Mr. Escott. At that time Lord John Russell was premier, with Grey, Palmerston, Macaulay, and Granville among his colleagues. They were little inclined to favor Catholicity, though in matters of politics they usually adopted a liberal line; and, considering that in 1829 there had been 2521 petitions presented to the Lords against emancipation, and only 1014 in support of it--2013 to the Commons against it, and only 955 in its favor--considering that of 238 newspapers in the United Kingdom in 1829, though 107 had been in its favor, 87 had been against it and 4 neutral--it was not surprising that the relief bill of Lord John Manners did not find as many strong supporters as it deserved. The country was alarmed at the spread of "popery," and the bill in question seemed designed to quicken its pace and widen its conquests. It would, if it had been carried, have removed some remaining disabilities; but the loss of the bill did not in reality affect in any very great degree the freedom of Catholics or the progress of their religion. The premier, Lord John Russell, in the same year--1847--when discussing the question of national education, stated that, if a desire were entertained to have schools for Catholics, and for such only, he would be in favor of it; but he reminded his hearers that "of all the half-million which had been already spent under the direction of the treasury, and in accordance with the minutes of the council on education, not one shilling was given in aid of the Roman Catholic schools;" and in the issue Catholic children were excluded from all participation in the grant of £100,000 a year which formed part of the government scheme of education brought forward by the prime minister. This is enough to prove how lukewarm Lord John Russell was in his wish to promote education among Catholics; and it is enough, also, to lessen our surprise at that monstrous display of intolerance and bad statesmanship with which he signalized his ministry in 1851.

It was two months after the close of the session in 1850, that a papal rescript establishing a regular hierarchy in England, and parcelling out the country into dioceses, was published by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and produced a commotion altogether disproportioned to the cause. The document was simple and ordinary in its character, and if issued in reference to any other country but England, would probably have attracted no attention, and certainly have excited no surprise, terror, indignation, and wrath. Among the English it was received like the news of a French invasion. It was denounced as a "papal aggression," and the prime minister, instead of allaying the storm, which he might easily have done, lashed the waves to fury by his letter to the Bishop of Durham. He affected to be taken by surprise, whereas the holy father had himself shown the brief to Lord Minto, Lord John Russell's father-in-law, who had been residing in Rome in a diplomatic capacity. Lord Minto had raised no objection to the publication of the document, nor offered any suggestion as to the mode of procedure. It was Cardinal Wiseman, therefore, and the Catholics of England and Ireland, who were taken by surprise when the premier, who had spent his life in promoting "civil and religious liberty," suddenly effaced the inscription from his banner, and stood forward as the most prominent assailant of Catholics in the kingdom. It was the more inconsistent and absurd in him to act thus, because the right of the Catholic bishops to designate themselves by the titles of their sees was recognized by common usage, by the servants of the government, and in one act, at least, of parliament. Lord John's inflammatory letter to the Bishop of Durham was followed by a speech from the throne, couched in very high-flown and pompous language about the necessity of maintaining unimpaired the "religious liberty" which no one had sought to invade except the premier and his friends.

The queen's speech was followed in due time by a bill for preventing the "assumption of any title, not only from any diocese now existing, but from any territory or place in any part of the United Kingdom, and to restrain parties from obtaining by virtue of such titles any control over trust property." Never was a more foolish measure carried through parliament; firstly, because it made not the smallest change in the existing state of things--it did not prevent a single bishop from using on proper occasion the title of his see, as conferred on him by papal authority; secondly, it was not even intended to be carried into effect. Lord John Russell and his colleagues never dreamed of summoning bishop after bishop into court, and compelling them to pay the fine of £100 each, or go to prison. Such a proceeding would have enlisted popular feeling immediately on their side. All the wisest heads in parliament--men like Lord Aberdeen, Sir James Graham, and Mr. Gladstone--warned the premier of the folly he was committing in pandering to the wishes of an illiberal and panic-stricken multitude.

The opposition offered to the measure by Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone is all the more to our purpose because both these statesmen became at a late period prime ministers. Lord Aberdeen was one of those whose minds had undergone a great change on many important subjects, and there can be no doubt that he had yielded his to the plastic influence of Sir Robert Peel. Having taken part in the ministry of the Duke of Wellington, he had, in 1829, contributed to the success of the emancipation bill; and when Peel was driven from office, after abolishing the corn-laws, by the resentment of the protectionists, he had followed his master into retirement, and declined a place in the cabinet which was offered to him by Lord John Russell. It was not likely, therefore, that he would in 1851 betray the principles which he held sacred, and aid in swelling an insensate cry. He saw clearly that the ecclesiastical titles bill had the double defect of being persecutive if carried into operation, and contemptible if passed only to lie dormant. He accordingly resisted it with all the more dignity because he knew that resistance was, for the time being, fruitless.

Mr. Gladstone has not been consistent in his politico-religious career. In 1838, he appeared in print as the resolute champion of "church and state," recommending the exclusion of all persons not of the Established Church from participation in the advantage of subsidies granted for religious purposes. In 1839 and 1840, he opposed the admission of Jews into parliament, and the assistance afforded by the state to dissenters for the education of their children. He upheld that unjust establishment in Ireland which he has since overthrown; and in 1845 he resigned his place in the cabinet in order that he might be perfectly free to vote as he pleased on the grants to Maynooth and the endowment of Peel's colleges in Ireland. When out of office, he supported both these measures, and rendered himself very obnoxious to many of his supporters at Oxford by the growing affection he manifested for liberal measures. The year 1847 saw him pleading for diplomatic relations with Rome, and complaining that the government had not communicated with the holy see before establishing the queen's colleges in Ireland. In accordance with these generous and enlightened views, Mr. Gladstone saw with disgust the intemperate conduct of the premier and the parliament in the case of the ecclesiastical titles bill. He contended that the influence of the Protestant church in England could never be maintained and extended by temporal enactments; that the papal rescript for assigning sees and titles to Roman Catholic bishops did not interfere in any way with the political rights of Englishmen; and ought not to be made the occasion of a hostile, oppressive, and impotent act of parliament.

"We, the opponents of the bill," he said, "are a minority, insignificant in point of numbers. We are more insignificant, because we have no ordinary bond of union. What is it that binds us together against you but the conviction that we have on our side the principle of justice--the conviction that we shall soon have on our side the course of public opinion?"

Events have proved how completely his words were true. The ecclesiastical titles bill is now regarded with scorn, and treated with ridicule. Earl Russell has confessed his mistake, and Catholics, whom it was intended to humiliate, are quite indifferent to a prohibitory measure which was never meant to be enforced. The reform bill carried through both houses by Disraeli and Lord Derby made the disestablishment of the Irish Church possible; the nation, freely represented, pronounced in its favor; and the measure was passed. A sense of justice, if not a feeling of repentance, has come over the public mind; and a brief space of time has sufficed to dispel prejudices that were the growth of ages. Mr. Gladstone, as leader of the liberal party, has been chiefly instrumental in producing this change; but it would be unfair not to specify Mr. Bright as another most powerful agent in bringing about the result. So long ago as 1852, the former gentleman declared his opinion that if Mr. Spooner's annual motion against the Maynooth grant should ever succeed, and "the endowment were withdrawn, the parliament which withdrew it must be prepared to enter upon the whole subject of the reconstruction of the ecclesiastical arrangements in Ireland." These words were considered remarkable at the time, and appear even more so when viewed by the light of recent events. They plainly foreshadowed that sweeping measure which we have recently seen him triumphantly carry. They pointed to a radical alteration in the existing unfair and anomalous relations between the church of the many and the church of the few in the sister isle. They left it, indeed, undecided whether "levelling up" or "levelling down" should be tried; whether the several churches, Roman, Anglican, and Presbyterian, should be all reduced to the voluntary systems, as in the United States, or whether the Roman Catholic clergy should be raised by the state to equal privileges and emoluments with those enjoyed by the Protestant pastors.

In the year 1868, it became manifest that the conservative and the liberal parties alike were agreed as to the necessity of doing something with the Irish Church. It also became apparent that the leading men in each party favored respectively the two plans just alluded to--the "levelling up" and the "levelling down" process. Lord Derby, with his son Lord Stanley, Mr. Disraeli, and other conservatives, were inclined to make the Catholic clergy in Ireland stipendiaries of the state; but they did not boldly and honestly propose any such measure for the consideration of parliament. The difficulties which faced them were greater than they could hope to overcome. The Catholic bishops of Ireland had distinctly refused to close with any offer of stipend for the priests. They asked for impartial legislation, but not for pay. This difficulty amounted almost to an impossibility; for of what avail was it to vote emoluments to those who would not accept them? But there was another obstacle of almost equal magnitude, which consisted in the unwillingness of the English people to endow "popery" in any shape. One half of the electors under the new reform bill were persons not in communion with the Church of England; and these, together with many Anglicans, approved the voluntary system in preference to national state churches of any kind. Lord Mayo, therefore, the Secretary of State for Ireland, was studiedly ambiguous in setting forth the intentions of the government in regard to Irish ecclesiastical matters. They were willing to establish and endow a Catholic university in Dublin, and to do something (no one could discover exactly what) in the way of "levelling up." Mr. Gladstone instantly exposed the absurdity of these crude and vague intimations. He declared in the most emphatic manner that the Irish Church must cease to exist as an establishment, and it soon became apparent that the liberal party were determined to aid him to the utmost in accomplishing his design. It was an extraordinary climax. The most popular man in the kingdom--a Protestant representing a Protestant constituency, and the premier-to-be of a Protestant queen and a Protestant cabinet--was willing and eager, in the name of the people, to disestablish and disendow that church in Ireland which had for three centuries been the pledge of Protestant ascendency and the main support of English and Protestant landlordism in that island.

His foremost opponents were the late Lord Derby and Disraeli, each of them prime ministers at different periods. Their opposition was the less formidable because they were both men of mixed politics. Lord Derby had been by turns the friend and the foe of Catholic liberty and equality. He defended the Irish establishment against Joseph Hume in 1824; but he supported, under the régime of Earl Grey, the cause of emancipation in 1832. He aided in relieving the Irish Catholics from the payment of tithes, and he helped to strike off the chains of the negro by presenting a bill for their liberation; but, on the other hand, he resisted with all his might the appropriation clause in an Irish Church bill of 1834, and even quitted office because he would not give it his countenance. To sequestrate any part of the property of the Irish establishment and apply it to secular purposes was, in his eyes, to commit a sacrilege and to violate a common right. To this feeling he continued to adhere, and to the last opposed the Irish Church bill intended to disestablish and disendow the Protestant Church in Ireland. He intimated, however, to the peers who were of his party, that he did not think it their absolute duty to oppose the bill as he had done. For the sake of consistency he voted against it, while not a few of them did otherwise, seeing how many evils might arise from their resistance to the will of the Commons and the majority of the electors. Yet it was he and Mr. Disraeli who made the passing of this bill possible and inevitable. It was the reform bill which they introduced, and which extended the suffrage to all householders and many lodgers, that made the liberal party stronger, and the abolition of the Irish establishment necessary. It is strange, indeed, that Lord Derby, who offered so dogged a resistance to free-trade and the abolition of the corn-laws, who, with Lord George Bentinck and Mr. Disraeli, headed the forces of the protectionists, should have been the means of developing the democratic element in the British constitution to a degree previously unknown and unsought, even by the liberals. It is strange, passing strange, that he should thus have brought about indirectly the measures he most wished to avert; and the fact of his having so acted is sufficient to stamp him as a second-rate statesman, and hardly worthy of a philosopher's name.

It would, we believe, be scarcely unjust to apply the same remark to Disraeli, notwithstanding his literary fame. He is too crotchety ever to be the great leader of a great party. What Willis said of him was true: "In a great crisis, with the nation in a tempest, Disraeli would flash across the darkness very finely; but he will never do for the calm right hand of a premier." His literary reputation preceded his political celebrity, and will outlast it. His mixed politics--his dubious radical-toryism or tory-radicalism--like the plus and minus in an equation, cancelled each other, neutralized his influence, and confounded his arguments by mutual disagreement. He discarded triennial parliaments and vote by ballot, defected to the Tories after coquetting with the radicals, and thus laid himself open to O'Connell's keenest abuse. "His life," the Liberator said, "was a living lie. There were miscreants among the chosen people of God, and it must certainly have been from one of these that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief who died upon the cross, whose name, I verily believe, must have been Disraeli." Certain it is, that even the friends and admirers of Mr. Disraeli repose in him little confidence. They never feel sure as to what he really is, or what he may become. He is an enigma and a sphinx. He has often embraced principles to make himself a name, and he has often sustained them in spite of unpopularity. "It is quite a mistake," he said on one occasion, "to suppose I ever hated Peel. On the contrary, he is the only man under whom I should like to have served. But I saw very clearly he was the only man it would 'make' me to attack, and I attacked him." Here is a key to Disraeli's character. The only premier he would like to have served under was one whose ruling principle was expediency; yet even this premier he was willing to oppose in order to rise in the political and social scale. So he, at the head of "Young England," denounced free trade in corn, and applied the system of protection to the state religion. He was, like Lord Derby, intensely opposed to the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland; but he was willing to endow Catholicity in Ireland to a certain extent, and thus make the state to be, like himself, an assemblage of contradictions--a builder up at the same moment of Babylon and of Zion.

All roads, it is said, lead to Rome; and in like manner it may be affirmed that all English prime ministers since the revolution have led Rome-ward more or less. All have been employed in raising the valleys and levelling the hills, that a straight path might be made for the majestic march of the restored and ancient faith. Every thing has told in favor of the gens lucifuga, the despised and persecuted Catholics, who shunned the light of day. If one and the other premier sought to oppress them anew, as Walpole did in his day, and Lord John Russell in our own, the unrighteous attempt recoiled sooner or later on its promoters, and ample reparation was made in the long run by a sense of justice being awakened in the popular mind.

The prime ministers of England, be it remembered, have been in some sense its kings--nay, more than kings. The real king has often been a cipher; the queen--as for example, Queen Caroline--has been above her lord; and the premier--as, for instance, Sir Robert Walpole--has controlled them both. And if this was the case in the last century, much more is it so now. England is in fact a republic, though nominally a monarchy. It is an aristocratic republic; and the prime minister being responsible to parliament, and representing for the time being the voice of parliament and the popular will in the council chamber of the sovereign, is himself the chief executive in the government, and holds in his hands more real power than any one besides in the kingdom. The monarch before whom he bows, and to whom he seems to defer, is in reality a puppet of which he works the wires. King George IV. was as nothing compared to King Wellington, and King William IV. was but a middy under the command of Earl Grey. Queen Victoria at the present moment (and we say it with sincere respect for that excellent and sovereign lady) is but a shadow to the substance Gladstone, and will be but a shadow to any prime minister who may succeed him. It was not so entirely with her grandfather. He was really a king. He ruled himself, and often very unwisely; but times have changed. Political and religious emancipation has conferred on Catholics an importance in the state which is altogether new, and conversions on a large scale during a quarter of a century have been a concurrent cause of their occupying a high and honorable position in society. No prime minister, therefore, can now ignore them, much less can he molest them. In every session of parliament some obloquy cast on them in former ages is removed. The lord chancellor of Ireland is now a Catholic, and very soon the lord lieutenant of Ireland may be so too. Every office of state, even the highest, will in all probability be in a short time opened to the Catholics, and the unjust law which excludes them from the crown, and prohibits members of the royal family from marrying them, will be swept away. If a Catholic were to be made premier now, it would not be more surprising than it was that Wellington should emancipate Catholics in 1829 or that Gladstone should demolish the Irish establishment in 1869. Providence has wrought wonderfully in behalf of the church already in England, and what has been done should be taken by us as a pledge of what is yet to be. Meanwhile, it will be well to remember gratefully, where gratitude is due, the labors of Protestant prime ministers for the removal of Catholic disabilities; and in order to do so adequately, we must make every allowance for the prejudices in which they were brought up, and the obstacles which lay so thickly in their path. We must not deny them all merit because they have yielded to the force of circumstances, but believe that they probably would not thus have yielded if there had not been in them some noble and virtuous impulse, some personal attachment to truth and justice. The stronger their original repugnance to concession, the more deeply they felt convinced in earlier years of the importance of maintaining intact the Protestant constitution in church and state, the more credit assuredly is due to them for having broken the spell of their youth, admitted that their ideas were erroneous, and faced a thousand reproaches and unmeasured obloquy in their determination to place the liberties of their fellow-subjects on a broader and better basis. The day has arrived in England when the Protestant premier and the Catholic primate shake hands, not merely as private friends, but also as representative men; and when they were seen not long ago in familiar intercourse at the foot of the steps of the throne in the House of Lords, they were for the moment living signs and symbols of that vast and happy change which has come over the relations between the English government and its Catholic subjects.

FOOTNOTES:

[187] W. B. MacCabe, Memoir of O'Connell. Madden's Penal Laws, p. 255.

[188] MacCabe, Memoir of O'Connell. Tablet, 29th May, 1847.

[189] This anecdote was related to the writer by the Bishop of Southwark.

FROM THE SPANISH.

LUCIFER'S EAR.

FERNAN. Come, Uncle Romance, tell me one of your stories.

UNCLE R. But, Señor Don Fernan, if they are not worth the telling?

FERNAN. Never mind; you must know that many people are pleased with Andalusian stories, and I am told that they write them.

UNCLE R. Then what I tell your honor is going to be printed! It makes me laugh; for you see I thought that those high-flying folks who go to college liked nothing but Latinity. However, with the help of God, I shall do as your worship commands, since those that give us good-will aid us to live, and gratitude is a duty that none but the base-born refuse to pay. I will go on telling; your worship will go on writing it down, and leaving out mistakes, and shaving off the roughness of my way of saying things, till it sounds like print; and your worship can write to those you-sirs, "My journeyman and I made this between us. If it is good, I did it; and my journeyman, if it is bad." Shall it be a story of enchantment?

FERNAN. The first that occurs to you; if you invent it, all the better.

UNCLE R. O señor! I can't invent. Those inventions are flashes of the mind; mine is too dull, Don Fernan; but I'll tell you a story that I've known ever since I cut my teeth. I've lost them all now; so your worship can judge what date it must bear.

FERNAN. The older the better. Stories are like wine, age improves their flavor.

UNCLE R. Well then, señor, there was once a rich tradesman who was father to a very fine son. He brought him up like a king's child, and, besides the accomplishments of a gentleman, in which the boy came to excel, had him taught in all branches as if he had meant to make him doctor of every thing. The son grew to be a young man with a will of his own; bearded and dashing; and for gallantry there was not another like him.

One day he told his father that the place had become too narrow for him; he could not content himself in it, and he wanted to go away.

"And where do you want to go?" asked the father.

"To see the world," answered the young man.

"You are like the grasshopper that jumps he don't know where," said the tradesman. "How are you to get along in those strange countries without experience?"

"Father, 'He that has knowledge may go where he will,'" the son replied; and as the old cock had allowed the young one to run so much to wings that he couldn't hold him, the youth took his arms, his horse of noble stirp, and set out to see the world.

When he had travelled three days through wilds and thickets, he came up with a man who was carrying a double cart-load--that is to say, a hundred and fifty arrobas of taramee upon his shoulders.

"Friend," said the young gentleman, "you carry more than a church mule. What is your name?"

"I am called Carry-much Carry-more, son of The Stout Carrier," answered the man.

"Would you like to come with me?"

"If your worship is as much for taking me as I am for going, yes."

So they went on together.

At the end of an hour they found a man who was blowing hard enough to burst his cheeks; sending forth more wind than the bellows of the forge of that Bulcan[190] who, they say, was a giant blacksmith, of those you hear tell about.

"What are you doing here?" asked the gentleman.

"Don't speak, your worship," said the man, "for I mustn't leave off blowing. I have to keep forty-five mills a-going with my wind."

"And what is your name?"

"Blow-hard Blow-harder, son of The Hard Blower," answered the man.

"Will you come with me?"

"Indeed will I!" said the man; "for I'm ready to collapse with blowing, day in and day out, as many days as God has put into the world."

A little further on, they stumbled upon a man who was lying in wait, listening.

"What are you doing here?" asked the gentleman.

"I am waiting to hear a swarm of mosquitoes rise out of the sea."

"Why, man! if the sea is a hundred leagues off?"

"And what of that, if I hear them?"

"What is your name?"

"Hear-all Hear-every-thing, son of The Good Hearer."

"Will you come with me?"

"With all my heart, since your worship is so kind; the mosquitoes will announce their approach presently."

The four went along in love and fellowship till they came in sight of a castle so musty, lonesome, and cloaked with gloom that it appeared more like sepulchre of the dead than habitation of the living. While they were drawing nearer, the sky was growing each moment more threatening, and, as they reached the castle, it burst into a torrent of rain; for size and sound, every drop might have been a cascabel.

"My master's worship needn't mind it," said Blow-hard; "we'll soon see what'll become of the storm." And he began to blow. The clouds, thunders, and lightnings scampered across those skies in such hurry and confusion that the sun stood squinting after them, and the moon staring open-mouthed with astonishment.

But this was not the worst; for when they got to the castle, they found that it had neither gate, nor door, nor postern, nor sign of an entrance.

"I told your worship well," said Hear-all, who had more fear than shame, "that this ugly-faced castle was only for a nest of magpies, and refuge of owls."

"But I am tired, and I must rest," said the gentleman.

"Give yourself no uneasiness, your worship," said Carry-much; and he immediately brought a big boulder, which he placed against the wall of the castle. They climbed up by this, and went in through the window. In the hall they found tables spread with the most famous dishes; all kinds of liquors, jugs of pure water, and bread of the finest quality. When they had eaten till they could stuff no longer, the gentleman wanted to explore the castle.

"Señor," said Hear-all, "if you meet somebody that asks, 'Where is this ball rolling to?' One should not make free in another's house unless he is well posted."

"Who's afraid?" said Carry-much. "We are not going to do any thing wrong; and if one draws a straight furrow, nobody will follow him with a plough."

"Let us get away from here, my master!" cried Hear-all, whose flesh was creeping with fear. "This castle is not in the grace of God; for I tell your worship that I hear noises under ground that sound like lamentations."

But the gentleman paid Hear-all no attention. His servants followed him, and they went on exploring those corridors and passages that were more intricate than if a lawyer had built them, until they came into a yard that was like an arena for bulls.

They had hardly set foot in it, when a serpent with seven heads, each one more fierce than the others, seven tongues like lances, and fourteen eyes like coals of fire, glided out to attack them.

Carry-much, Blow-hard, and Hear-all, more scared than rats found out of the hole, ran as if they would run out of their trowsers; but the gentleman, who was as valiant as the Cid and as strong as a Bernardo, drew his sword, and with four strokes, and four back-strokes, cut off the creature's seven heads in less time than you could say tilen! The biggest of the seven glared at the gentleman for an instant with its savage eyes that darted fire and blood, and then gave a bound into the middle of the yard and disappeared through a hole which opened in the ground to receive it.

At the gentleman's call, the three who had fled came back, and were well astonished at their master's bravery.

"Be it known to you," said the cavalier, who was looking, without seeing bottom, down the hole the serpent's head had gone into, "that we are going now to the fields to get hemp and palm-leaves to make a line that will reach to the floor of this well." They did so; and the four spent four years making rope. At the end of that time they felt it touch bottom. The master then told Hear-all to slide down it and see what was below there, and come back and let him know. But Hear-all stuck to his supports, as upright as a palm-tree in a gully that no wind moves, and said that he'd be smashed first and go down in pieces.

Then the master told Blow-hard to go. Blow-hard took fast hold of the rope, and descended night and day till he got to the bottom, where he found himself in a palace like the famous ones you read of, and in the presence of the Princess of Naples, who was lying on a bed with her face downward, weeping tears as big as chick-peas. She told him that Lucifer had fallen in love with her, and would keep her enchanted there until one willing and able to fight and vanquish him should present himself. 'Here is one already who is going to undertake the enterprise,' said Blow-hard, and he drew in a long breath, which was scarcely drawn when Lucifer appeared in person. The sight of him frightened Blow-hard so that he ran and climbed to the top of a door. Lucifer unhinged the door with one thwack of his big tail, and it fell to the ground with Blow-hard, and broke one of his legs.

We will leave him with his bitter cud, and go back to the gentleman, who, tired of waiting for Blow-hard to come up, asked Hear-all what was going on down there in the bowels of the earth. Hear-all told him what had passed, and that now he could hear Blow-hard complaining of a broken leg. Then the gentleman sent Carry-much, who assured him that he would shoulder Lucifer and bring him up, if he weighed more than all the lead of the Sierra Almagrera. But, step by step, it happened to Carry-much just as it had to Blow-hard, except that he got an arm broken instead of a leg.

"I will go down myself," said the gentleman, when Hear-all related to him what had taken place.

When he reached the palace and saw the Princess of Naples, he fell into such love with her wonderful beauty that he prepared himself for the encounter with a double ration of valor.

Christians! such a fight as there was then between the good cavalier and the cursed dog of a Lucifer the world has never seen; as, naturally, it would not see, since Lucifer never comes to fight above here in his own form. But the gentleman crossed himself, and, as every man must who commends his cause to God, vanquished the devil. He did more; for he cut off one of his ears.

The state Lucifer would be in at seeing his ear in the hands of a Christian, I leave to your consideration. His yells had such an effect upon Hear-all that he repeated every jerk and spring. You would have said that he was being repeatedly stung by a tarantula.

"Give me my ear!" shouted Lucifer in the voice of a trumpet.

"You will give me a good ransom if you get it," answered the cavalier; "for I have taken it like a true knight in fair combat; therefore, I shall make three conditions with which you must comply."

"Insolent braggart!" said Lucifer.

"Oh! you may spit out the gall; but I warn you that I am going to pickle your ear and show it for money," replied the cavalier.

Lucifer danced with rage.

"What are your conditions, low-born, ill-bred, and worse-thriven?" he demanded.

"The first is, that you instantly return this princess to her own kingdom and palace," said the cavalier.

There was nothing for it but to comply; so Lucifer placed the princess in her royal palace, and then said to the cavalier, "Give me my ear."

"No," replied the cavalier; "you must first transport me, with my three servants and such a kingly suite as becomes your vanquisher, to the court of Naples, and into a suitable lodging, which you will have prepared for me."

"It does not suit me, little bully, to have you diverting yourself, and triumphing at my expense."

"Very well. I will publish, with the sound of a clarion, that you have lost an ear. We shall see then if you can disguise yourself as a notary, lawyer, agent, money-lender, or lover, without being found out in less than no time."

"Now," whimpered Lucifer, after he had placed the cavalier in Naples, with great riches and an immense retinue, "give me my ear."

"I have it here," said the cavalier, "and I don't want it, for it smells of sulphur; but you have yet to fulfil the third condition."

"What is it, impudent upstart?"

"I am not quite ready to tell it. In the mean time, have patience, which, if it will not serve you to gain heaven, will be of use to you in getting back your ear."

Lucifer changed from poison to the essence of venom. "You are seven times worse than I," said he to his vanquisher. "By the soul of Napoleon! there is more knavery on earth than in hell. But you shall remember me! By my horns and tail, I swear it!" And off he went, pulling at his remaining ear for vexation at finding himself outwitted by a Christian.

Well, when the princess saw the cavalier so finely gotten up, and with such a splendid following, she recognized him, and told her father that he was her saviour! and that she wished to marry him. They were married; and I was there, and saw, and came away, and nothing was said to me; for I slipped in and out without being seen;[191] mindful of the saying, "Neither to wedding nor christening go unbidden."

But, señor, you must know that, after the wedding-bread was eaten, the princess and the cavalier led a cat-and-dog's life together; for the woman's temper and manners had become so bad and intolerable while she remained under the power of Lucifer that no one else could abide them. So, when the devil appeared to beg for his ear, the cavalier said to him,

"I am going to give it to you; but you must comply with the last condition I impose for its ransom."

"Knave! Mountebank! You would damn me if I were not damned already! And what is this last condition?"

"That you take my wife again," responded the cavalier; "for you are like for like, Peter for John."

FOOTNOTES:

[190] Vulcan.

[191] Manner of ending a tale.

THE VATICAN COUNCIL.

NUMBER TWO.

We intimated in our last number our intention of presenting each month to the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD an article on the progress, and, so far as we could, on the proceedings of the Vatican Council, now in session. We shall endeavor, in so doing, to state facts, the accuracy of which we can guarantee. Misstatements, silly, absurd, and not unfrequently mischievous, are sent by "our own correspondents," to fill the columns of hostile newspapers; and they may sometimes disturb the minds and sadden the hearts of the unwary. We wish to give such an account as shall correct such errors and misstatements, by an accurate and impartial statement of the truth. Our form of a monthly publication may subject us to some delay, and to the disadvantage of saying much which our readers will have already seen in the daily and weekly press. But on the other hand, it will secure for us fuller and more accurate knowledge of our subject than could be obtained at an earlier period, and may enable us, perhaps, to form a more mature judgment on many points. Our aim is to give a series of articles, which our readers may preserve and refer to hereafter. In writing them, we are guided by information derived from the best sources.

The amount and the variety of misstatements and of mistakes about the council and its doings, that have fallen even under our own eyes, would seem incredible. The talent of fiction seems to have attained a truly marvellous development. We tried to classify them. There were fictions to blame, and fictions to praise, fictions droll, fictions malicious, fictions stupid, fictions about persons, fictions about things, fictions about words, fictions about the past, fictions about the present, fictions in the shape of conjectures of the future, fictions gay and witty, fictions solemn and dull, fictions pious, and fictions blasphemous.

But then even this stream of incorrect statements, the result of imagination striving to eke out a scanty knowledge of facts, or of prejudice looking at every thing through a distorted medium, is poured forth to satisfy, if it can, the cravings of the public, and is an additional evidence of the intense and universal interest the Council of the Vatican has excited. Men may misrepresent it, they may hate it, or fear it. They cannot despise it. It seems they cannot be silent about it.

The time has not yet come to speak of the results of the deliberations of this venerable body. Perhaps it is well that it is so. As yet, our minds are still dazzled and preoccupied by the outward splendor and the striking external aspects of the council. Everywhere in Rome, you hear men commenting on these points, and comparing the present oecumenical council with those which the church has celebrated in the past centuries of her existence.

But once before in her history were so many bishops gathered together. In the second Lateran Council, assembled by Pope Innocent III., in 1139, about one thousand bishops united. The next largest number was at Chalcedon in 451, where six hundred and thirty bishops assembled; and next to that came the second Council of Lyons in 1274, under Gregory X., at which five hundred were present. Of the other councils, one had over four hundred bishops, five over three hundred, and the others all fell below that number.

Since the day of the opening not a few additional bishops have arrived, and the total number now taking part in the present council cannot fall below seven hundred and fifty. The Vatican Council stands, therefore, by a mere count of numbers second on the list. But, as a representation of the entire world, it far exceeds all that have preceded it.

The remarkable punctuality with which the council was opened is a subject of surprise and gratification, and may well be looked on as a signal evidence of the protection of divine providence. It has not always happened that councils could meet at the time and the place first indicated in the bull for their convocation. Sometimes only a comparatively small number of bishops could assemble; and weeks and months, and perhaps a year would pass by, before such a number could gather together as to render the opening of the council advisable. The difficulties of journeying were great. Oftentimes political jealousies, and the wars of nations, interfered to delay and embarrass, if they could not altogether thwart, the meeting, as well as the action of the council. Something of this kind was anticipated by many in the present instance. When, in 1867, Pius IX., in his address to the assembled bishops, stated his purpose of holding a sacred oecumenical council of the bishops of the whole world, in order that, with their united counsels and labors, necessary and salutary remedies might, by God's help, be applied to the many evils under which the church suffers, the heart of the Catholic world thrilled with delight. But among infidels and non-Catholics, and even lukewarm Catholics, or those of little faith, there was many a jest and many a sneer. Many a paper assured its readers that the council would not, could not assemble; and some, who thought themselves well informed, declared that before the day for opening it would arrive, Garibaldi would be in Rome, and Pius IX. a wanderer and a fugitive, far from the Vatican. Plans were even then being laid to bring this about; and, ere many months rolled by, a well-prepared and vigorous attempt was made to carry them into effect. The attempt signally failed. The battle of Mentana forbade its renewal in that shape for some time to come; and the storm, at one moment so threatening, passed by. The council was called, and the place and the day of its meeting appointed. What Garibaldi and his party had failed to effect by arms, diplomacy now attempted in another guise. The chief minister of a so-called Catholic power professed to entertain great apprehensions of the possible results of the council, and sent a secret circular to the courts of the other Catholic nations of Europe, urging the expediency of united action in such shape as might control the decisions of the council. Had the plan been adopted, and the spirit in which it was conceived been carried out in the details, the result would probably have been what the originators intended, and what indeed some of their papers announced to the world as already determined on. The council would have been postponed, perhaps would not have met at all. But this plan failed too. The circular was received coldly, and the proposal fell to the ground. Under the guiding hand of Providence, all was peaceful. The bishops (save those under the Czar of Russia) were free to travel in peace; and they came at the voice of the chief pastor. From the volcanic and coral islands of the Pacific, from Hudson's Bay and Labrador and Canada, from Brazil, La Plata, and Chili, from the golden shores of California, from rugged New England and the fertile valley of the Mississippi, from mysterious Egypt, and the classic isles of Greece, from the sacred hills and cities of Palestine and Syria, from the stricken remnants of Assyria and Media, from Persia, India, Burmah, Siam, and China, bishops were journeying toward the central city of the Catholic world. The antipodal Australia and New Zealand sent still others. From every country of Europe, Hungary, Bohemia, Illyria, Austria. Prussia, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, France, Spain, and Portugal, England, Holland, Belgium, Scotland, and Ireland, the Island of Saints, they came, not merely a few delegates, but it seemed the entire episcopal body en masse. Distance and difficulties of the journey were no obstacles; even old age and infirmities seemed to have lost the power of retaining these prelates at home. Among the arrivals in Rome over a score had passed eighty years of age, and one, not the least vigorous among them, had reached the mature age of ninety-five. And so it came to pass, under the blessing of Heaven, that in this nineteenth century, in which even that profound statesman and excellent Catholic, Count De Maistre, once said it would be simply impossible to convene a general council of the church, all difficulties have vanished, and without one hour's delay or postponement, the Vatican Council, exceeding all others save one in its number of prelates, and far surpassing that one in its intrinsic grandeur, was opened in the majestic Basilica of St. Peter, on the day and the hour originally appointed. We may trust that the blessing of Heaven will continue with it, and that its results will be commensurate with the prayers and hopes of the Catholic world, in promoting the glory of God, in establishing the kingdom of Christ our Lord on earth, and in leading men to Christian holiness and eternal life.

In our former article we gave an account of the grand spectacle presented at the opening session. In the present one, we will speak of the general congregations, or committees of the whole, as we would term them, in which most of the work is to be done. The curious observer will find here many of those old rules and forms from which the modern and civilized world has derived our existing codes of parliamentary rules. It is interesting to observe the points of agreement and of disagreement. For of later years, in our mundane parliaments, the strife of party spirit, and sometimes the necessity of settling a question by a given time, have brought in various devices unknown in those older and quieter assemblies for the purpose of shutting off debate, or overcoming the reluctance of a minority for a speedy vote.

An oecumenical council is, under one point of view, a deliberative assembly of the entire Catholic Church. The sovereign pontiff, who, as successor of St. Peter, the head of the apostolic college in the see of Rome, is head of the Catholic Church and the centre of unity, presides ex-officio. As his right and his power were not bestowed on him by the church, but were instituted by her Divine Founder as an essential part of her organization, it follows that they do not cease, or suffer suspension, on occasion of, or during the holding of a council.

His office in reference to councils has been recognized from the beginning. A Council of Alexandria, in their letter to Pope Felix II., in the year 362, wrote: "We know that in the great Council of Nice all the bishops unanimously declared that councils should not be held save with the judgment of the Roman pontiff," and Julius I., in his first letter to the eastern churches, appealed to the ancient laws of the church, which forbade "the holding of councils without the knowledge and assent of the Roman pontiff, because the Holy Roman Church held the primacy over all the churches." In the first place, then, an oecumenical council must be summoned by the authority of the pope. In the second place, he presides in the council ex-officio, either personally or by such legates as he may send. The First Council of Nice in Bithynia was held in 325. Three hundred and eighteen bishops were present, all of them (save half a dozen) patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops from the east. Osius, a bishop of Spain, and two priests from Rome, presided in the name of Pope Sylvester. Meletius of Antioch, and afterward St. Gregory of Nazianzum, presided in the name of Pope Damasus in the First Council of Constantinople, in 381. St. Cyril of Alexandria presided at the Council of Ephesus in 431, in the name of Pope St. Celestine I. St. Leo the Great sent two bishops, Pascasinus and Lucentius, and two priests, Boniface and Basil, who conjointly represented him, and presided over the Fourth General Council at Chalcedon, in the year 451. The same right has been exercised in every succeeding oecumenical council. Nor could it be otherwise. The body cannot be separated from the head without destroying the life of the church. The gates of hell would then have assuredly prevailed over her.

A third right and office of the sovereign pontiff in relation to oecumenical councils is that of confirming and giving force to their decrees. His is the supreme duty and charge of confirming his brethren in the faith. Pope St. Damasus expressed the Catholic doctrine and practice on this head fifteen hundred years ago, when he wrote to the bishops of an African council, "You well know, that to hold councils without the authority and approval of the Roman see is not according to the Catholic spirit; nor do we meet any councils that are held as legitimate which were not supported by its apostolic confirmation." The words of Pope Damasus were then specially significant and emphatic. Not a quarter of a century before, in 363, six hundred bishops had assembled at Rimini, and, under pressure from the Emperor Constantius, had passed decrees which Pope Liberius reprobated. At once, and ever since, that Council of Rimini has been held as utterly destitute of authority.

An oecumenical council, therefore, to be truly such, must be convoked by the sovereign pontiff, or by his authority, must be presided over by him, either in person or by his legates, and its acts must be confirmed and sanctioned by him.

To say he has the duty of judging when the necessities or dangers of the church render it proper to summon a general council, in order to meet or to remedy them, implies obviously that he will propose to the council the matters on which he calls for their judgment and their coöperation with him. As president ex-officio, it is his duty to make such arrangements in accordance with the spirit of religion, and the usages of former councils, as will facilitate and expedite the action of the council, and allow the bishops to return as quickly as possible to their flocks.

In the present instance, the sovereign pontiff has done this chiefly by the brief, Multiplices inter, and by the labors of the five preparatory commissions, which have for nearly a year and a half been studying up the subjects which are to form a portion of the matter to be discussed and decided on by the council.

We have already spoken of this apostolic letter, Multiplices inter. It was dated November 27th, and having been printed in pamphlet form, was delivered to the bishops on December 2d, nearly a week before the opening of the council. There are ten chapters in it, several of which set forth the mode of procedure which will be followed in the council in the transaction of business.

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